JOURNAL EXCERPT: May 11 Thurs. 1978

"J. B. brought those three books [referred to in the May 5 Journal Excerpt] to work. They were Making U-Hoo, Unwary Heart, and Me Natalie. All I can say is her intentions were good.

"Saw an accident (already crashed, police there, etc.) on way home from work. Someone ran into a pole."

MANHOOD REDO: I have to admit that the three book titles make me curious. After doing some digging around on the web, I found out that Making U-Hoo, which sounds like a corny romance novel trying to imitate a 1930s or 1940s movie is actually a mystery by Irving A. Greenfield. He might not have been a well respected author since he doesn't have his own website and he's not listed in Wikipedia, but he wrote a lot of books, and a used hardback of Making U-Hoo is being sold on Amazon.co.uk for over 78 pounds and the U. S. Amazon for over $100. You can buy the paperback for $2.90, though. So I'm not sure what to make of him.

I would guess that Me Natalie was a novelization of the movie by the same name, which there is a Wikipedia entry on. It's a 1969 dramedy directed by Fred Coe, in which Natalie, played by Patty Duke, feels she is an ugly duckling. Her father hatches a plan to marry her; she finds out that it's a set up and leaves home for Greenwich Village, where she becomes a cocktail waitress, lives the bohemian lifestyle, and gets involved with a married man. When she finds out he's married, she considers suicide, but he convinces her she's beautiful and worthwhile. I'm tempted to see if it's available on Netflix.

The last book, Unwary Heart, was a Harlequin Romance, I believe, by Anne Hampson. It looks like Ms. Hampson wrote a lot of books. That's really all I can say about her.

Even today it would be embarrassing to have a romance novel in my possession. I'd rather read a feminist book interpreting romance novels. That more clearly fits into my picture of myself. And I would be willing to see Me Natalie but not read it. Lastly, I wouldn't be inclined to read Greenfield's mystery unless it did some interesting genre-bending.

And yet there was a time when I read all these sorts of books. When I first started reading something other than comic books, I poured over everything I could get my hands on. There was no distinction between literary fiction and popular fiction. I even read a few romance novels because I was curious about them, so if I'm honest, it's really not so easy or straight forward to think of myself as a man who has never identified with these kinds of books. I remember enjoying Frank G. Slaughter novels, staying up all night reading them.

If developing a healthy masculinity is in part about reclaiming parts of ourselves as men that we've supressed or had supressed, maybe it would be worth considering finding a way to claim these novels J. B. gave me - or at least what they represent.

JOURNAL EXCERPT: May 9, Tues. 1978 9:45 PM

"G. came back today. I helped him unpack all his furniture etc."

Manhood Redo: I'm surprised that such a big event merited such little text. I don't even sound the least little excited. Given the kind of loneliness I was experiencing and have written about in earlier blog entries, you'd think I would have been thrilled, overjoyed, ebullient. But G.'s move back sounds routine, almost something to take for granted.

Sometimes I resent the hell out of masculinity - for instance, when it tamps down joy I might be feeling, and I mean a silly, happy, almost giddy joy about people and events. I've kept the full extent of my emotions - both exhilaration and sorrow - under wraps for so long that it still can be hard to not only express them but also to find a way into them. Someone at work told me I'm hard to excite; maybe that's true based on what I'm seeing today in this journal excerpt. Although it might be more the case that I have excitement bubbling up in me and am cautious about expressing it. I'm trying to think about both what forms of excitement are sanctioned by traditional masculinity and what aren't. Obviously, it's okay to get excited about sports if you're a guy. You can yell and scream and jump up and down and cry if your team loses. But had I jumped up and down and screamed in excitement about G. moving back to Lubbock, I can't help but think that people would've looked at me either like I was crazy or thought I was gay. So even in the journal I was keeping at the time, even in a personal and private space where I might have felt free to express what I didn't feel free to express elsewhere, I'm restrained.

Let me try to be a little unrestrained now. The last time I saw G. was maybe 20 or so years ago in Lubbock. I had tried to track him down a couple times over the web but never had any success - until about a month ago. He had been on my mind, perhaps because of this blog, so I just on the spur of the moment decided to try one more time since it had been quite a few years since the last time I checked the web. I had little in the way of expectations, so I was shocked when a photo of him turned up. He looked just about the same, except his hair had turned completely gray. He's in a covers band now. When we were friends years ago, he dabbled with the piano, and the two of us would sing Beatles tunes along with his car cassette player as we drove back and forth from Lubbock and San Antonio, but I never would've predicted he'd be playing keyboard and sharing lead vocals, singing anything from the Texas Tornadoes to the Temptations. I don't know if he sings lead on "YMCA" but that I would like to hear, maybe even dance to.

He's in the Southwest but no longer in Lubbock; he hasn't been there for a long while. I'm not sure what will come of our getting back in touch since we're far apart, there is a lot that's happened since we last saw each other, and we're both busy, but it's exciting to have him in my life again, even if only in a minimal way. He's someone who's had a significant impact on my life. I was best man at his wedding. We worked on a comic strip together and tried to syndicate it. We went camping for almost three weeks, driving from Texas to Oregon and back. We shared and critiqued our creative writing. We read our favorite poems to each other.

JOURNAL EXCERPT: May 7, Sun. 1978 11:10 PM

"No insert tonight, so I don't have to go in [to work on the newspaper dock] till 12:00 AM. Just finished recording Emerson, Lake, and Palmer on the King Biscuit Flower Hour. Recorded them on one of the Scotch tapes. Sounds fantastic.

"Slowly reading Moby Dick. On page 150.

"Didn't get off work last night till 8:30 AM. Presses couldn't start until the results from the governor, senatorial, etc. elections were in, so they didn't start running till 3:30 AM. I'll be glad when I quit."

"I received notice yesterday that I had been readmitted to Texas Tech, so it's official now. Back to school again. I'm going to major in English lit."

MANHOOD REDO: By this point I was very ready to leave the Avalanche Journal newspaper dock behind. Material and monetary success are very much a part of traditional masculinity, and while I have never been one to place high value on either, I knew that I could only work the dock for a limited time before I would be seen as one of those guys who never had any drive, who failed to live up to his potential. Plus, I had been connected to the AJ for quite a while.

I had started working their when I was a senior in high school - first as a city newspaper driver, which meant I delivered papers to some of the carriers in Lubbock in a particular area of the city. There were probably 10 to 12 of us, and since the AJ had a morning and afternoon edition, we had to make deliveries twice. Usually, about a half hour before the city bundles would be ready to start coming down the chute - sometime between 2 to 3 am - we would receive a call telling us to come in. I roomed with T. my first semester of college, and I don't know how he managed to sleep through the phone ringing in the middle of the night. In the afternoon, we had to arrive at the dock about 2:30 or 3 pm. This lasted for about a year before I started working the dock, eventually becoming dock foreman. I was responsible for overseeing the other dock workers, for making sure that the bundles of papers ended up in the right country and city trucks, and for stacking the bundles for the car carriers on the dock.

I dropped out of college after my second year and went to work for a small print press, which I generally hated, especially when I had to stack inserts on wooden pallets. They came off the press in batches of 25 for the local Piggly Wiggly grocery stores, and I would purposely take my time stacking so that the inserts backed up, jamming the track, and someone would have to come over to help me keep up. After about nine months, I'd had all I could take and decided to quit, making plans to return to college. They hired a Vietnamese immigrant in my place who was more than happy to stack Piggly Wiggly inserts on a pallet, which made me feel sort of like a snotty nosed, entitled college kid, even though I wasn't exactly yet.

The timing was such that I wouldn't be able to start until the fall semester, which was some months away, so I had to find work in the meantime. I really didn't have a sense of where to start looking, and even though it felt kind of humiliating, I thought the easiest thing to do would be to go back to the Avalanche Journal, although I didn't know whether there would be a job available. But the AJ dock always had a lot of turnover, so I started almost right away. Many of the same people were there, and they were happier to see me that I was them. I knew that my time would be limited, since I planned on quitting when I returned to school.

I had some sense that a degree in English literature might give me a little more merit and status in the world than the position of dock foreman at the Avalanche Journal, but I couldn't have told anyone how since I only chose that major because I had discovered I liked to read and I wanted to write creatively - not exactly a well planned career path.

JOURNAL EXCERPT: May 5, Fri. 1978

"I am at work, standing by the ramp. J. B., the only woman country truck driver, walks up to me. I didn't feel like talking to anyone.

"'Hey, Pat,' she says. 'I was gonna bring you some paperbacks tonight, but I forgot about 'em.'

"I think I said, 'Really?'

"'I went into my bedroom to get 'em, and I forgot what I went in there foar when I got there. There was these paperbacks on the dresser.'

"I couldn't think of anything to say.

"W. W., another truck driver, said, 'I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that does that.'

"'I don't do it all the time, ' J. says. 'But I went in there and forgot what I went in there foar. I'll bring 'em sometime.'

"I still couldn't think of anything to say.

"She walks off."

MANHOOD REDO: This excerpt seems like a follow up to the previous one where I tried to tape country truck drivers talking on the Avalanche Journal newspaper dock without them knowing it, only instead of recording on a cassette, I'm recording the conversation on paper from memory. Like a number of journal entries, this one's a little embarrassing to read, partly because of the "foar," which appears twice and sticks out like a sore thumb. It more than anything else takes the dialogue in a direction I would avoid now, playing as it does on the stereotypes of hillbilly dialect that signal a lack of education. In my memory J. was just about as nice as could be, always thinking of others, as this excerpt suggests, and yet what I wrote seems to carry some unspoken disdain for her. Replace the "foar" with "for" and I think you have dialogue that's more internally consistent and coherent - and less judgmental.

Not only do I think the above journal excerpt has to do with the insecurities of my own newly found desire to be "educated" (I had dropped out of college after the second year and reapplied for admission to Texas Tech University just a little over a week before I wrote down the conversation), it probably had something to do with the fact that J. was the only female country truck driver. She worked in a very masculine world and held her own, but to my my twenty-something self she always seemed a little out of place, providing me with another reason to dismiss her.

I never bothered to find out why she was working on the grave yard shift driving miles and miles by herself most nights of the week delivering bundles of newspapers to small towns in the region around Lubbock.

My loss.

JOURNAL EXCERPT: May 3, Wed. 1978

"Took a cassette player to work to try and record some dialogue. Didn't work too well. I didn't want anyone to know I was recording them, because it might have made them nervous, so I hid it in my coat. Didn't work too well at all."

MANHOOD REDO: I suppose I was intending to use the cassette player as a means of advancing my creative writing skills by studying actual moments of conversation so that I could better write dialogue in my short stories. I'm wondering, though, whether my disinclination to let anyone on the newspaper dock know I was recording them really had anything to do with making them nervous, implying that they might not talk like they normally do and I wouldn't capture their normal style of talking. That was probably just a crap excuse I used since I knew that if I was open about documenting their conversations on tape, I would've needed to get their permission, and they might not have consented, especially since most people don't like to hear their voices.

I don't particularly like to hear mine. When I was teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago as a graduate student, I recorded on cassette two of the classes I was teaching, and they were godawful - all the uhs, and stops, and starts, and sentences trailing off. Plus, I just didn't like the sound of my voice. I wanted it deeper and more distinctive - more masculine, I suppose. An American version of Sean Connery. I can only imagine how I would've felt if I found out that a student had brought a recorder to the class and later found out she or he had secretly taped me without my permission.

I had to know I was disregarding people's feelings in order to go ahead and do whatever I damn well wanted to advance my own agenda - something I associate with traditional masculinity. Fortunately, my coat got in the way.

JOURNAL EXCERPT: May 2, Tues. 1978 8:25 PM

"It's damn cold today. It's 39 degrees now, and rain has fallen most of the day. I woke up about 11:30 AM to the sound of thunder and rain. I wouldn't mind the wet weather if it wasn't so cold. What's going on with our weather? It's awful strange. I'm going to have to wear my heavy coat tonight, and I haven't worn it for a month now."

MANHOOD REDO: I looked online yesterday at the weather prediction for the next 10 days in Lubbock: 80s and 90s for the highs. So 39 degrees at the beginning of May was odd. But then West Texas is known for its odd weather, especially during the spring when there are typically wild fluctuations. It's a time of almost daily tornado watches and ominous thunderstorms. I've never seen more stunning lightning displays than in West Texas, where the land is so flat that the sky looms over you. One day it will be in the 90s, the next in the 60s. And the dust can kick up, billowing up miles high so that if you're outside the city you can watch a wall of dirt making its way across the landscape. It's a place of harsh extremes.

It's interesting to me to think about masculinity in connection with the the landscape, the geography of a place. Nowadays, people are so mobile, this concept might not hold much merit in anyone's mind, but I know that when I moved from Niles, Michigan to Lubbock, Texas at the age of 11, I was immediately confronted with what seemed to me to be a harsher masculinity. My first day of class, I knew that I might be in trouble when the teacher announced my name, and all the boys in the class started laughing, most of them indicating they'd never heard of anyone being named "Pat."

JOURNAL EXCERPT: May 1, Mon. 1978 9:00 PM

"I got up around 3:00 PM. Even though I didn't get to bed until about 6:00 AM, that's too late. I should've been up around 2:00 PM. I'm afraid my sleep is going to get screwed up again. There have been a couple time, about a week and a half each time where I haven't been able to sleep but three or four hours a night, and for no other reason than I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep. I nearly went crazy during those sleepless periods. I never want to go through something like that again, although I'm sure I will sooner or later. I'm going to set my alarm clock tonight so I don't sleep so late."

"I wrote. Still trying to finish the first copy of the story about Jack. On page 19 now. I'll have to rewrite it as soon as I finish it. Then I'll have to type it. I can't believe Fitzgerald used to write a complete, finished, entire story in a single sitting, the son of a bitch. No, actually he's very important to me, or I should say his writing is. I enjoy his stories much."

MANHOOD REDO: My sleep has never been quite the same since working the graveyard shift, and it's been almost 30 years. During my youth, I slept easily and peacefully, even under difficult circumstances. Now there can be some anxiety attached bedtime. Anybody who has had serious insomnia knows the hell it is. When I wanted to apply to grad school and needed to take the GRE, I was working nights. They only offered the test in the mornings, so I decided to start sleeping from 1 pm until about 8 pm everday a week before the exam in order to be alert the morning it was administered. That worked, but in the days following my sleep cycle was so messed up that I could only sleep for a couple hours a night, and that lasted for weeks. After a while, I lost all sense of time. I would start to phone people at 3 in the morning. At one point I think I hallucinated bugs crawling all over the rug of the house I was living in.

Now, I do okay on seven hours, but less than that starts to wear and tear on me, especially when it takes place consecutive nights. When I'm under stress, I tend to wake up anywhere from 2:30 am to 3:30 am, then find it hard to get back to sleep. Since I'm in my fifties, it's not unusual to have to go to the bathroom. But also, my mind kicks into high gear, sifting through everything, replaying events, task lists, fretting about what's already happened, what's going to happen, what needs to happen. That in itself is exhausting, but then add the anxiety about getting back to sleep, and it's like you're caught in a neverending washing machine cycle, buffeted about by your mind, uncertain when the spinning is going to end. It's hard to rid yourself of the expectation and fear that you won't get back to sleep.

I see sleep as attached to traditional masculinity in various ways. First of all, as a "real man," you're not supposed to let anything get to you. It's a sign that your outer shell is too thin if you wake up and fret when you don't need to; you're too fragile. Also, when you're having trouble sleeping and hence difficulty functioning, it's not something you can really admit to others. All of us men walk around assuming the other men are in control of their sleep cycle, unless their behavior is completely out of control from drug or alcohol addiction. Finally, there are the super sleepless men - those who only need a few hours a night to function perfectly fine; in fact, they are creative, energetic dynamos who use the extra time to get the upper edge on all the other men.

Nancy Kress wrote a series of science fiction books about genetically modified humans who don't need sleep at all. They are superior in many, many ways to sleep-needy humans. They consisted of males and females. But in our popular historical culture, it seems to me that we attribute the myth of productive sleeplessness to men: Leonardo da Vinci, who became the namesake of polyphasic sleeping, or intermitent naps in order sleep less hours and produce more; Benjamin Franklin, who said, "There will be sleeping enough in the grave"; and Thomas Edison, who held sleep in great contempt, instead practicing catnapping.