And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (3 page)

I
didn't dwell on the moment in the coming days and weeks, but I found it happening again and again at the least expected times. During my evening commute, at the dinner table, sitting on the couch, watching the boys play on the floor and feeling Molly's warm breath on my neck while she slept on my chest. And each time, it was nearly the same. A sense of panic, a feeling of emptiness, anxiety, and incompleteness.

Anxiety is nothing new to me. When things were really tough, when money was tight and my career was going nowhere, I suffered a few times from panic attacks. At one point, a few years before Molly was born, fearing that I was dying of some undiagnosed condition, I went to a doctor, who told me that there was nothing physically wrong, apart from a few extra pounds and not enough rigorous activity—which I took to mean sex as, I'm sure, any man would. Try as I did to sell my wife on the idea that upping our romantic heat might have medicinal benefits, she remained unconvinced and recommended that I go see a therapist.

I should say right off that I have nothing against the mental health professions, but the idea of paying someone to talk about my feelings was about as appealing as paying someone to spit in my food. In my family, the only problems you talked about were those contained in your math homework. And even then it was an act of desperation. It's not that we don't have emotions. Quite the opposite, actually; it's just that our emotions tend to run the spectrum between pleasantly contented and pleasantly bored. If you were to map my family's emotional expressiveness through color, you'd only need eggshell and beige. When I was growing up, we always were a jovial bunch, if not a close one. My mom has a tremendous sense of humor—one of the best of all time—but I can probably count on a single finger the number of times I've seen her visibly angry. Dad's emotions are only slightly more contained. I remember the two times he got really angry with me when I was under his roof. The first was middling compared to most fathers. The second was when I was twenty and we were fishing in Canada, but we'll get more into that later.

Despite my misgivings, I had taken Rebecca up on her suggestion. I tried to explain all this to the therapist in our first session—my family's peculiar lack of emotional effusiveness—and was asked in return, “How does that make you feel?” Feel? How should I know? That's the point. And that's the biggest reason I knew I was not destined for a life of therapy. I steered the conversation toward the physical symptoms of my troubles, and it took her exactly three seconds to diagnose anxiety.

“Do you know what your problem is?” she asked over the brim of her overlarge, Annie-Potts-in-
Ghostbusters
glasses.

“No,” I said. “I was hoping that's what you could tell me.”

“Your problem is that you believe every little thing that crosses your mind. If your brain tells you that you're not good enough, you believe it. If your brain tells you you're not doing what you're supposed to, you believe it.”

“Why wouldn't I?”

“Because it's bullshit.”

She told me to imagine all my negative thoughts as news items on the ticker that crawls across the bottom of the television screen. See them, but dismiss them. And it worked. I hadn't had an anxiety problem for close to four years. Of course, I never went back to therapy, but that's because I figured I was done. I assumed the problem had been solved, that the thin woman's work was finished and guaranteed like an oil change from an ASC-certified mechanic. I was good to go, only to return on the occasion of a mechanical failure.

For four years, things worked well. Until Molly came home. Until I felt for the first time that dull ache of nothingness. It was in mid-December when I was standing in the upstairs bathroom of my parents' house in Cleveland, shaving off my wiry mustache in the mirror I used to pop zits in as a teenager, when I caught a glimpse of myself. All at once, the panic set in, the heavy breathing, the thumping chest, the aggressive ennui. I made a few careless final swipes at my face with the razor and cut my lip, then went downstairs, holding a blood-sodden piece of toilet paper to my wound. Dad was sitting where he normally sits, in his dark blue leather recliner next to the fireplace. The television was on—a Cavaliers basketball game. My sons were on the floor. Molly was sleeping on her grandfather's chest. Rebecca was talking to my mom in the kitchen. I stood in the doorway and looked at it all. My family, my father. My life laid before me in complete innocence. And then I realized what had been troubling me; I saw the words on the ticker in my mind.

You are the same age your dad was when you were born and you feel nothing like him. You don't feel in control of your life. You don't feel like a man.

It was as if I had been staring at a book in a foreign language and all of a sudden I understood what the words meant. And it wasn't bullshit. It was exactly the truth, fact, clarity.

It's hard to explain the profundity of that moment. All my life I had been my father's son, my mother's son, and despite marriage, a career, children, and bills, I never really felt like a grown-up. Whereas my dad, who was in fact a year younger than I was when his third child—me—came along, was always so grown-up; so put together; had such a clear grasp on the world.

And my uneasiness lingered with me for weeks, through the Christmas holiday and into the new year. The panic was gone, the physical symptoms abated, but there was this sense of not feeling up to the life I was leading, of not fulfilling my role.

Of course it's not fair to compare yourself to your parents. You come from different places, different times. My dad grew up in Iowa, working on farms and walking to a country school. He went to Iowa State where he studied chemical engineering, and he later joined the army and became an officer. He grew up with eight siblings in a three-bedroom house. He made his own sausage.

All this seems like so much mythology when I think of my own anticlimactic superhero creation story. I grew up in the suburbs, a child of the '80s and '90s. I was an English major, and the only thing I ever had to share with my siblings was a healthy regard for Guns N' Roses and John Cusack movies. The closest I ever came to raising my own food was when I planted and killed a small tomato plant as part of a Cub Scout project. It wasn't that I felt I had wasted my life or was unhappy with it. Far from it. I had a pretty good life. It was just that I felt somehow stuck in the hinterland between youth and adulthood, being a young man and simply being a man. I wasn't stuck in the middle. I was 85 percent of the way there. But I wanted to know what it felt like to be the man in my household, the way I had always viewed my dad. And the mustache hadn't done the trick.

I needed something. A change. A continued evolution. Having a family early meant drifting apart from my college friends, nearly all of whom were slower to get married and have kids. Living as we had under constant financial strain meant any hobbies I may have had, any aspirations to travel or try new things, bowed below the weight of an always-too-small budget. I had long been comfortable with the fact that I would never have any stories about sowing my wild oats, about crazy trips to Mexico, or about following the imprudent impulses of youth. And, to be honest, I was fine with that. I never wanted anyone other than Rebecca. I still don't. Having a family had been a surprise, but it was quickly a welcomed one and I knew, even in the midst of the heaviest ennui, that what I was feeling was nothing like regret. It was more like unfulfilled potential.

There isn't a mustache lush enough to make up for that.

3

I Want to Hunt

I
t was late—maybe around midnight in February—and I was sitting up in bed, the TV on top of our dresser was tuned to the Travel Channel, and the host was buying a load of hunting gear from an upscale shop in Vienna, Austria. He seemed pleased, like a lot of men are when buying themselves new toys, particularly when those toys are being paid for by someone else. My wife was asleep on the couch in the living room, having passed out watching her favorite soap opera and surviving another day at home with our three kids.

I was tired, not feeling well, and I knew I should be asleep. But even the cold medicine that promises a good night's sleep wasn't helping. I was feeling listless. I felt like I had things to do, but I didn't know what. It was just a general sense of obligation. I watched the host tool through the Alps in a Land Cruiser with his hunting guide in search of deer. They spotted a few nice big bucks. They were well within range, but the host didn't take a shot. He can't, he explains to the camera, because the show blew their budget on hunting gear. They could afford to shoot a doe, but a buck was just too much money. He laments wryly, then heads home with the hunting guide to eat venison and sausages around a small family table.

He made the whole thing look so cool, so invitingly manly, and I was overcome by the need to buy hunting gear. A gun. Coat, pants, an orange hat. Boots with a gusseted tongue to keep out deer ticks and water. Specialty hunting gloves with slim-fitting trigger finger and tacky palm for gun control. A dog whistle—a dog for that matter.

That night, I dreamed about hunting for the first time in my entire life. I dreamed of a giant deer, like an animatronics dinosaur at one of those roadside walk-through theme parks, emerging from the woods gracefully and walking up to me with the sauntering grace of a ballet dancer. It looked down on me, its steaming breath covering me in warm fog. I looked up at it in awe, just before it raised an angry hoof and squashed me into the ground. The entire scene was painted in Surrealist Technicolor and it was, of course, absurd beyond belief. Yet it felt so real. I'm not one who puts a lot of stock in dreams and signs. I don't believe that seeing a black cat will bring me bad luck, and I'm not the kind who runs out to the local gas 'n' suds to buy a lottery ticket because a cricket made its way onto my dashboard.

But I couldn't help but feel like an answer to my lack-of-manliness malaise was revealing itself the next day when I checked my e-mail at work and found a message from a publicist at the Travel Channel asking if I might be interested in interviewing its newest star, Steven Rinella, the host of
The Wild Within.
I get requests like this often, but usually it's from the author of a terrible book on the intricacies of forensic stamp collecting or the inventor of a product designed to make the pesky task of storing Play-Doh a breeze who's looking for a little publicity. It comes with the territory. At this time, the online magazine I edited,
Man of the House,
had a fairly loyal following of half a million readers. We'd just been featured in the
New York Times
, the
Boston Globe,
and elsewhere, so the requests for stories and profiles had stepped up significantly and I had gotten in the habit of deleting most of them unread. But the Travel Channel? Here my favorite television network was offering me an opportunity to talk with one of their hosts. How could I pass it up?

I didn't know anything about Steven Rinella or his show when I accepted the invitation, so I went on a research bender. I discovered that he was the author of two books about food and hunting. I watched the demo videos the Travel people sent me of his show, which was about his adventurers as a hunter and outdoorsman, and found myself fascinated. Never before had I seen a man stalk, shoot, and eviscerate a moose. Especially not on television. The closest I had come to ever seeing something like that was in an old horror movie. And yet, I wasn't grossed out. I was interested. I read his second book,
American Buffalo,
which recounts his youth as a sportsman, his lifelong fascination with America's most unique and once-treasured species, the bison, and his once-in-a-lifetime hunt for the animal in Alaska.

One line in particular struck me. Near the climax of the book, Rinella finds himself all alone in the wild north, lying prone and setting his sights on a buffalo roaming below and in front of him. Just before he pulls the trigger, he says to himself,
This is how food is made.
Such simple profundity, such clarity of purpose. I thought,
Now there's a man who knows exactly who he is, what he likes, and what he wants to do.
In short, there is a man nothing like me.

We made arrangements via e-mail to chat on a Tuesday night. He'd call me. I'd ask some questions about the show and he'd answer. Half hour at the most. They always say that when you do these kinds of interviews, as if the celebrity has many more important things to do than talk to you.

I once did an interview with an actress who had a minor role on a popular cable show and had costarred in a movie with Sylvester Stallone. Prior to our interview—which was conducted over the phone late at night—I received no fewer than four e-mails from her publicist reiterating the importance of her getting off the phone within fifteen minutes. She was then more than twenty minutes late calling me, which made me wonder if I somehow owed her five minutes and how I would go about repaying it? Knock a cigarette out of her hand just before she flicked her lighter? Buy her a field greens salad? A round of Botox? When at last we did get on the phone, I found myself apologizing for taking up her time, which, I told her, I understood was so precious.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Your publicist told me you have something very important to do tonight.”

“No, I don't.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. I'm in my pajamas and it's only seven thirty here.”

“So publicists are liars?”

“Pretty much.”

This early experience interviewing the famous—or sorta-kinda-if-you-squint-in-just-the-right-light famous—took the fear out of the process for me. In subsequent interviews, I was cool and calm, knowing that it wasn't about a brush with fame or coolness by association. It was a business transaction and would more than likely be about as interesting as depositing a paycheck in an ATM.

Yet I found myself nervous to talk to Rinella. My palms were sweating when I pulled into the parking lot of a Starbucks not far from home. I had decided to take the call there to avoid the inevitable interruptions that come when trying to do work around the kids (or my wife for that matter). When I'm at home, seldom do five minutes pass in the waking day when I am not being beckoned from another room. I wanted to concentrate, to focus. There was something about Rinella—in his books, on his show—that resonated in me. I didn't want to pay him short shrift.

The e-mail came ten minutes after the time we were supposed to talk. It was simple and to the point. He had gotten the date of our interview mixed up. He apologized and offered to talk again at a time of my convenience. He signed it “SR” as if we have known each other for years. Two, maybe three sentences. He didn't overelaborate or make up an excuse to make me feel better. I remember thinking,
This guy even apologizes like a man.
I sent a note back and suggested the same time two days later and so found myself sitting at a back table in the Starbucks, pen in hand, a spare nearby, a couple of notebooks and a copy of
American Buffalo
splayed about the makeshift workspace. I couldn't believe how nervous I was to talk to a guy who a few days earlier I had never heard of, and I tried to calm my nerves when I picked up the call on the third ring.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Craig, it's Steven.”

And so began one of the most interesting conversations I've ever had with a complete stranger. We talked for an hour and a half and when we were done, I began writing furiously. I don't normally do this. I usually wait a couple of days for an interview to sink in, but there was something about the guy that inspired me. It was his perspective. His belief that people willing to eat meat should be willing to harvest it; that hunters are too insular, too cliquish, too defensive. They don't make room for the curious. They don't make it easy for people to try. They don't do a good job selling their passion as a viable pastime.

Interviewing Rinella, spending time with him on the phone and hearing about his complicated relationship with his father and how fatherhood has changed his perception of what it means to be a man, I felt like I was talking to a man further along in his evolution than me. And yet, I was inspired. I too had a complicated relationship with my dad. I too wondered if I could change enough to be the dad I wanted to be. I realized what I had to do that night. I had to learn how to hunt. I come from a long line of hunters—at least as far as I know. My dad is a hunter. His brothers are hunters. I don't know a lot about my grandfather—either of them—as they were both gone by the time I was in third grade and my mom's dad I never met. And yet I had resisted, but talking to Rinella, I became fascinated. It felt right, the exact thing my weary manhood needed. I would become a hunter. It was as simple as that. I would venture off into the woods, gun in hand, and kill something and then everything would be better.

Just wait and see.