Vanity of Vanities

May 22, 2012 By Max Lindenman 2 Comments

Some days, you just wake up to a big, wet kiss from life. This morning, when I logged on Facebook, I found a surprise waiting for me. A friend of mine, whom I will identify by his initial, T., had posted a message on my wall. It read:

Max, Haha just saw some funny pictures of you so sexy lol you have to see them its here

A link to a Twitter page followed.

There was nothing implausible about T. posting such a message, or having such a video. In the first place, that’s a fair sample of T’s diction. Here’s a good rule of thumb for sorting out my Facebook friends: if someone posts clips of Daniil Trifonov playing Chopin’s Études, then I can guaran-damn-tee you he wouldn’t recognize me if he ran me down in his Prius. If, on the other hand, he prefers to go commando where the rules of punctuation and grammar are concerned, chances are he’s a tried and true companion, and we share many fond memories of drinking Tecate ’04 and listening to Kid Rock’s Adagio in G minor.

As for the video — well, I was sure I knew which one he meant. Right after 9/11, in a sort of adult game of cops and robbers meant to soothe the shame we felt over our non-combatant status, my friend Rick and I went skydiving. Rick paid extra to have some guy with a video camera bolted to his helmet follow him on the 11,500-foot trip down. Most of the footage, then, consists of Rick spinning in midair wearing a rictus grin and a stoical jumpmaster. But for a few minutes at the beginning, Rick and I appear together. In one 30-second sequence, we’re standing side-by-side in the hangar, listening as the jumpmaster explains the meaning of the words auxiliary chute. We look like any two guys would look struggling to recall their high school physics lessons in order to form a realistic picture of how a two-mile cliff-dive into a lagoon of sand and scrub might affect their weekend.

T. is also a friend of Rick’s. I know for a fact he has been made to watch that very video at least half a dozen times. In this context, his use of the word “sexy” would surely have been facetious.

Or rather, it would have been facetious for him. For me, it would have contained a statement of fact. Two years before my airborne adventure with Rick, I had decided to grow my hair out. Don’t ask me why; flowing manes on men hadn’t been cool since a plane crash halved Lynyrd Skynyrd, when I was five. Nevertheless, like I do most of my inexplicable, lemming-like instincts, I followed this one with a whole heart. By the time I jumped, my hair was down past my shoulders. In my humble opinion, I did look sexy. When a Lakota co-worker told me that my scalp would have brought as much cachet to one of her ancestors as the Heisman Trophy brings to its winners, I hugged myself over a successful fashion statement.

Since I am unable to keep a camera for more than three weeks without losing or breaking the thing, this video represented the sole surviving evidence of my Merovingian phase. But I didn’t want it only for my personal use; if I may say so, I’m much more generous than that. Two months ago, when I announced I was embarking on a campaign of physical re-generation, my readers — many of them Facebook friends — offered their huzzahs. Touched, I made sure to post evidence of progress: the details of a workout routine one day, a friend’s Blackberry shot of myself in sporting wear the next. Finding and re-posting the video of the Hair Days would serve as one more reminder that they were backing a firm with a respectable history, one whose recent Chapter 11 filing counted for nothing but an embarassing fluke. Like I said, I pride myself on my generosity.

Excited for myself and my stakeholders, I clicked the link on the Twitter page. It led to a Facebook login page. This seemed strange, since I was already logged into Facebook, but I wrote it off as more Zuckerbergian prudery, like the rules against bullying and the “promotion of cutting, eating disorders and drug use.” Logging in as directed took me to a page with a video viewing screen. Blocking the screen was a very unwelcome message bearing the YouTube logo: “PLAYING THIS VIDEO REQUIRES THE LATEST MEDIA PLAYER UPDATE.”

There was, thank God, a download button. But when I clicked it, one of those windows with a red X in the corner flashed on my screen, accompanied by a clanking sound. The gist of the message was that something had gone wrong, and my computer would have to shut down and restart itself. Fine, thinks I. Patience is another of my virtues. When Windows rebooted, I logged straight back into Facbook and followed the steps faithfully, only to hear the same horrid clank and read the same grim announcement.

I’ll have everyone know I am not a cut-and-run man. Whenever anything really important is at stake, I refuse to appease failure. I stay the course and gut it out, like a Clemenceau or a Cheney. After three or four more restarts, I decided to find this mysterious media player on my own. I went to Java’s homepage and downloaded their latest. Then I clicked over to RealPlayer’s homepage and downloaded their latest. Both times, I logged back into Facebook expecting to find the video viewable, perhaps a still of me in my ponytail covering the screen. Both times, my designs were frustrated.

So I decided to beat a strategic retreat. Changing gears, I, wrote some press releases for my friend’s SEO firm, read a few articles where Salon readers confronted their childhood bullies, and told myself new downloads took a while to work their way into an operating system, like charcoal heat into a steak. Just as I was starting to read something about Greece’s new far-right Smegma Party, or whatever it’s called, I glanced up at my tool bar and noticed a pending Facbeook event.

It was a friend’s “Like.” Apparently, I — or something pretending to be me — had posted on his wall a message along the lines of: “OMG! I just got a free i-pad! This is the best day of my life!!! Don’t you wish you were me?” I recognized it right away for a forgery. I never had an old i-pad; it would have gone the way of my cameras and, come to that, my cell phones. This imposter must have had quite a work ethic, for within seconds, I found myself facing a small flood of messages from friends who sounded both happy for me and curious to know what I’d been smoking.

Long story short: one computer-savvy lady explained that T. had never posted the message in the first place. Some hacker had posted it in his name. As soon as I logged in to the page behind the link, I, too, suffered a hacking. “Your computer needs a full scrubbing,” she told me, in tones halfway between those of a mechanic and a colon specialist.

I changed my password, and I suppose I’ll have to reboot my whole hard drive using my startup disk. There must be a lesson in here somewhere, raw material for a life-changing homily. But I’ll leave someone else to pan for it. I’m no preachypants, and besides, I’m due at the gym. A hard drive can be rebooted; hard delts and traps have to be earned.

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Life After Sex?

May 10, 2012 By Max Lindenman 14 Comments

Yesterday, at the Crescat blog, Katrina Fernandez wrote that nobody has ever died from not having sex. Initially, her statement struck me as a bit reductive. No, the body doesn’t need sex in the same way it needs food and water, but it does appreciate sex — so much so that it’ll thank people for supplying it. Researchers have found that regular sex raises the antibody immunoglobin, burns calories and releases endorphins that can fight migraine. All things being equal — that is, assuming nobody’s at risk from a venereal infection or a cuckold’s avenging dagger — people are better off doing it than abstaining.

But really, all that amounts to is hair-splitting. Life without sex may be less rich or less pleasant in certain respects than life with, but it is still perfectly livable. And I’m just now starting to see how livable. As I become ever more firmly convinced that I’ve no call for sacramental marriage, I find to my own astonishment I’m becoming increasingly cool with that. The fact is, I’ve gone without regular sex for — well, in the interest of decorum, let me say, for longer than society would rate normal. Kat’s right: I haven’t dropped dead. All I have to do is keep it up — so to speak — for the rest of my life, and I’m golden.

There are challenges, but they aren’t the challenges I’d have expected if I’d tried to anticipate a chaste, celibate life, say, ten years ago. For me, love affairs — and I’m old-fashioned enough to call them that — have had about the same effect on my heart as artillery had on the Belgian landscape during the Great War. Consequently, when, on seeing an attractive woman, I recite the lover’s equivalent of the dieter’s caveat “a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips,” I actually listen. .

Of course, there’s more to chastity than not shacking up with someone. If you’re a woman, chances are good I’ve seen you naked in my mind’s eye. (Quit worrying — you looked fine. Skeletons are for Halloween.) I learned this trick when I was 14; by now it’s a reflex. How unfortunate, then, that Jesus found this kind of thing so loathsome that he proscribed it by name when preaching on the Mount. Compared to the likes of me, blessed are the gays and lesbians, for they got called out only by implication.

In a Pat Conroy novel, a high school basketball coach urges his players to counter one kind of creative visualization with another. The moment they find themselves projecting some cheer squad nymph, or Jackie Kennedy, or whoever, into a pornographic scene, they should switch gears and picture her on Thomas Crapper’s fine invention, in a housecoat, with her hair in curlers. Probably, this advice is as sound as anything St. Ignatius ever came up with, but in my case it might be overkill, since Post-Rejection Stress Disorder works its magic on the imagination, too. My spiritual exercises run along the lines of:

Imagine the two of you waking up one morning and having nothing to say.

Imagine the two of you clinging to one another anyway, from sheer terror of loneliness.

Imagine each of you playing cunningly on the other’s feelings of inadequacy because you’ve got to find some fun outside of sex, which has gotten god-awful dull.

Imagine her turning into her mother instead of your mother.

So, there you go: thought-purification in four easy steps. But using it calls for some meditation on the law of unintended consequences. Let’s say a person does manage to will himself himself out of thinking about sex — unless he’s content to sit around in a daze, making mucus sculptures, he’ll have to find something else to think about.

Anecdotal evidence tells me lust’s replacements are rarely pretty. Post-concupiscent people almost never pick up cool hobbies like golf or paragliding; instead, they become obsessed with politics or the Weather Channel. Or else they fuss over their pets to a degree that would guarantee a kid a lifetime in therapy. And they babble about these enthusiasms to anyone with a pulse, until that person, even if he be the sternest aescetic this side of Alexandria, says to himself, “Jesus H. Christ. That guy really needs to get laid. Or at least think about it.”

A few days ago, one of my readers brought up Courage International, the ministry for gays and lesbians who want to lead chaste lives. Courage encourages its members to form friendships, presumably as a hedge against these spirals into eccentricity. That’s fine in principle, but I’m unfit for marriage because I am rigid and inconsiderate and moody and needy and poor. I need friends like me like I need a septic stab wound. Fortunately, I seem to have a knack for getting myself adopted by normal people. I favor a balance of two kinds:

1. People who are happily married, to remind me that someone out there is living the life he wants to live,

2. People who are unhappily divorced, to remind me that not everyone is.

Stoical types like cancer survivors are good in moderation, provided they refrain from giving speeches about lemons and lemonade and boxes of chocolate.

A woman I know favors “romantic friendships” — sexless but emotionally intense attachments that entail complex reciprocal obligations. In general, these arrangements seem to work for her; some have clearly served as the proverbial wind beneath her wings. But others have gone very bad, rotting away in mutual jealousies, screaming fights and rambling drunken late-night phone calls. By my lights, these set-ups have all the potential for drama of a love affair and all the potential for sexual fulfillment of the solitary life, which seems as winning a combination as Southern efficiency and Yankee charm. Not for me, thanks. Post-concupiscent life may end up doing something I once thought impossible: it may make a social butterfly of me.

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Narcissus Without Echo

March 28, 2012 By Max Lindenman 8 Comments

If I find myself spending this summer shirtless and posing for photographs, I’ll have Justice Antonin Scalia — no relation to my editor, although I’ve told friends otherwise — to thank. Yesterday, while counsel were delivering their oral arguments for and against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Scalia asked, “Why not mandate health club membership?”

That got me thinking. I remain a member in good standing of L.A. Fitness. Every month, the club withdraws $30 from my checking account. Yet I haven’t stepped foot inside the place since fall of ’10. Like all those insured Americans who never manage to get sick or hurt, and who never need Viagra or Wellbutrin or extensive dental work, I’m paying into the system and seeing no benefit. Rather than let my monthly fee cover some non-payer’s time on the racquetball court or the eliptical machine, I decided, yesterday evening, to get my money’s worth.

Oh, all right — there’s another reason. Remember the woman I alluded to in my essay on the transformative power of grief? Well, we had a rematch, which ended even worse than the first. Not that I’m planning some male version of the revenge diet. In any circumstances, revenge is vulgar; in these, it’s unwarranted and worse, impossible. The woman was young. How young? Young enough to have mistaken me, briefly, for Lord Byron. Young enough that I carry the blame for my own undoing. Young enough, finally, that no matter how many reverse curls I end up doing, she’ll still look perky, to a Kim Cattral-ish degree, when I’m figuring out Charon’s tip.

What the situation demands is a simple self-respect transfusion. Treating my body to a restoration campaign, such as cities devote to their historic buildings, should do the trick. I’m not naturally imposing; indeed, that’s what makes these transformations seem so magical. In my late 30s, I plumped my neck to 18 inches and shrank my waist to 29. Remembering myself at 13, with the spare tire that earned me the nickname “sausage,” and glasses thick enough to fry ants through, I would think, “Only in America.”

But it ain’t morning in America. I turned 40 this past January — that makes it halftime, at best. When I grew my beard, I noticed the right side and the chin were shot through with gray — grizzled, by God! Every day since then, I’ve checked the mirror, expecting to find I’ve sprouted a gut, lost inches in height to osteoperosis, or that my pectoral muscles have begun softening into breasts.

But, somehow, last week, when I surrendered to the first stirrings of the workout bug, neither pushups, nor parallel bar dips, nor stomach crunches nor neck bridges caused me to dissolve into a puddle of senescence. In fact, after only a few days, I noticed a subtle improvement in my physique: angles and bulges emerging where once only lines and empty space had been. In his last years, the Duke of Marlborough was fond of pointing to Kneller’s portrait of his youthful self and telling visitors, “Now that was a man!” For those of us who aren’t Dorian Gray, that’s about as good a deal as can be hoped for. It was the hope of securing an image I might carry in my head on the slow slide to the grave that made Justice Scalia, for once, sound sage.

For those who live on Mars, L.A. Fitness is a nice, middle-of-the-road kind of gym — neither chi-chi nor ghetto, dominated neither by fanatics nor laggards. A democratic spirit governs the place: tottering seniors and boisterous frat rats, club owners and airport baggage handlers, all share space politely like leopards and kids. This is particularly true at night, I’ve noticed, which is when I followed my vision to the outlet on Scottsdale and McDowell. When I arrived, at about 10:30, the scanner wouldn’t beep when I scanned the bar code on the tab I wear on my keychain. The pantherlike young man behind the desk took it from me, tried scanning it himself, then handed it back with a frown.

“This thing must be ancient,” he said. “Stop by on your way out. I’ll get you a new one.”

An ancient tab for an ancient patron made a horrible kind of sense. But damned if stepping past the desk into the main workout room didn’t rejuvenate me. Clean and brilliantly lit, the place is nothing if not peppy — top-dollar industrial design experts have seen to that. Apparently, subtlety doesn’t figure into the skill set of a top-dollar industrial design expert. Over the PA system, the Ready Set was singing — cross my heart:

Hey, hey we’ll be young forever
Tonight will last forever ’til our bodies drop

Having exhausted my pecs, delts and tris earlier that day with the pushups and the dips, I decided to work on my biceps: concentration curls, preacher curls, standing curly-bar curls and hammer curls. With a horror of confronting my newfound weakness, I decided to keep the weight low and the reps high. To my delight, I discovered my optimal weight had decreased by only about 25%. It’s true after all — muscles do have memories. My form was good. I felt, as they say, the burn. In front of me, lying on a bench, was a 20-something guy dressed sweats and a polo, pressing 40-lb dumbbells. With a pleasure that kicked the endorphin rush up toward delirium, I noticed he had — if I may borrow an indelicacy from Chuck Palahniuk — bitch tits.

All my life, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with young and attractive people. When I was young — but not awfully attractive — I used to resent the golden ones who were the complete package. I preferred to hang around older, geeky types who never judged me, and who made me look good in comparison. Grief Girl was the same way; that was my in with her. She’s an exotic beauty who grew up in a place that scorned anything exotic. Finding her was like finding an out-of-the-way, unpretentious restaurant where the food is amazing, and because the clientele is small, where the servers learn your name the first time around and remember it forever. She was happy to find an appreciative regular patron, who — because I offered up praise so freely — did the equivalent of writing her up for Zagat’s.

That’s the problem with best-kept secrets — they never stay secret for very long. Barely a month into my second go-around with Grief Girl, she found her way into her own version of the Cool Kids: men her own age who doted on her and competed for her attention; women who stepped aside respectfully when she claimed her place at the table. “I think,” she told me one day, in that schoolmarm manner she affects whenever she’s steeling herself to piss somebody off, “I need to spend more time with my own age-mates.” And that was the beginning of the end.

I used to work biceps and laterals on the same days. The concentric motions, or eccentric motions, or whatever they call what your muscles do when you work them with weight attached, are complementary. After finishing the last of the hammer curls, I went over to the pulldown machine and began banging out reps. I’m not saying most gym rats are pussies; but if you happen to be a pussy, as I am, being a gym rat is probably your best entree into he-man culture. Doing a set of wide-grip pulldowns requires next to no small-motor coordination; neither is there any danger involved. Let the machine do what it does, and you’ll feel tough; do it regularly enough for long enough, and you’ll look it, too.

I wish I was a real tough guy. Every time I’ve tried, I’ve managed to get hurt. I must say in my defense that I’ve never gotten into it with anyone less than a third bigger than me. Once, when I was cycling home from my friend Byron’s house, a bunch of jockish-looking guys yelled something as they passed me in their car. Catching up with them at the stop light, I threw them a hard look, and the guy in the front passenger seat said, “Meet us in the Circle K parking lot, bitch.” I rode across the street to the Circle K; they were already out of their car, waiting. I had barely gotten off my bike when I went down in a flurry of punches.

But then something strange happened. Lying flat on my back on the asphalt, I did what would have come naturally to anyone who cycles 30 miles per day: I kicked. Hard. I felt a couple of cracks as my foot landed against something that felt like a knee or a face. When I opened my eyes, I saw the heavies forming a defensive perimeter around the car. The group pencilneck was telling me, “It’s over, okay? Forget about it.”

As they drove off, I stood up and assessed the damage. I was bleeding a little from the mouth, but no teeth were missing. My eyes weren’t very swollen. I got back on my bike and cycled home in good time. It was a beautiful evening.

Unfortunately, the next time I tried to be a tough guy, which was in a bar called Murphy’s, I got knocked unconscious. I woke up the next day on my friend Rick’s bathroom floor feeling nauseous, with double vision and my jaw swollen like a canteloupe. I retired that day with one moral victory to my credit.

After I’d squeezed out my last pulldown, I walked back to the free weights area and began bent-over rows. Despite the name, this is one of the most he-mannish exercises around. As you contract your lat muscles to pull a dumbbell from the floor to your chest, you are throwing a punch in reverse. You are building exactly the kind of explosive force that can make someone piss or spit blood, if you hit him right. I happen, oddly enough, to be very good at these — I must work out my lats somehow in the course of a normal day without realizing it. After every set, I bumped up the weight five pounds; on my last two or three reps, I was grunting like a tusked boar, which made me feel good.

Grief Girl was a regular valkyrie. A crack shot. A hiker. During our last week, she went skiing for the first time and took a black diamond without incident. During that same week, she began dropping a name. A guy’s name. Her voice rose to a squeal whenever she did. The name, she gave me to understand, belonged to a French guy who, as she put it, “used to get into all kinds of street fights for some right-wing political group, but quit because he thinks it’s stupid now.”

I don’t know whether they ever ended up getting together. But this internal drama of mine needs a villain; if I sat down and thought for a week, I doubt I could invent one more perfect than this clown. I’m almost sure I’ll never meet this person, and I know, deep down, that I could do bent-over rows from now until doomsday without making myself able to splinter his jaw. But I can make myself look as though I could. In my straitened circumstances, that will have to do.

These are not good Catholic thoughts. Sister Joan Chittester thinks we should celebrate the march of time and the pile-up of years. Fr. Jim Martin thinks we should quit judging other people, including ourselves, by appearance. My good friend Joanne McPortland once compared me to Rose of Lima because I wrote admiringly of how the Church encourages believers to renounce physical vanity. But this is an emotional emergency that admits of no solution except that I get cut. Besides, I can’t shake the fear that, deep down, the thing that led me into the Church that champions the underdog is my own sense of being a wallflower and a weenie.

I’d hate for that to be true — it’d make me into a cliche. (Not that being a middle-aged guy who’s searching for Tyler Durden makes me an American original.) No, better to follow my muse, to sculpt myself, to wear wife-beaters and shirts that show off my guns, and then see what compassion is left in me. It’s easier to be compassionate when you’ve got no self-contempt to displace. The Adam Goldberg character from Dazed and Confused wanted to be a labor lawyer but secretly despised working people. He was also a haunted, miserable wretch until he decked the town bully. Did repairing his self-image re-affirm his vocation to help the common man? I honestly can’t remember, but in my fanfic version, it did.

I finished my rows and re-racked my dumbbells like a good citizen. In the locker room, I checked myself out in the mirror. My muscles looked less corrupt than incipient. I saw — or, like Tweety Bird, thought I saw — the beginnings of cuts in my shoulders and chest. My triceps were beginning to resolve themselves into neat triangles. My lats were nascent wings. Of course, that could have been the euphoria that comes from finishing a workout, or a trick of the lighting, designed by those experts to flatter the subject into coming back for more. But there are times when a man simply has to believe the best about himself.

The pantherlike young man at the desk fussed around, looking for a new tab to replace my ancient one. He was truly pantherlike — dark, sleek and composed. He would not have looked out of place curb-stomping an Algerian or, more to the point, sharing a hot tub with Grief Girl at Gstaad. Finding a working tab somewhere in his vast stack of drawers, he handed it to me. “Here you go, sir,” he said.

Sir. Not bro; sir.

Well, hell with it. It’s Lent, after all. No better time for a reminder that you’ve got to bear the Cross to win the Crown. I don’t know what the Supreme Court will decide about the Affordable Care Act, but I hope the government doesn’t start forcing everyone to join a health club. I couldn’t stand to live in a world where everyone was hard.

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