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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Callista Gingrich: Sign of the Times?

January 23, 2012 By Max Lindenman 10 Comments

James Dobson, scourge of Spongebob and the Teletubbies, has found a live target. Speaking this weekend at a conference in Texas, he condemned Callista Gingrich as “a mistress for eight years.” Karen Santorum, who “set aside two professional careers to raise those seven children,” he said, would “make a fabulous first lady role model.”

Dobson’s very use of the word “fabulous” is sign enough the world’s spun right off its axis. But in Forbes, Victoria Pynchon predicts his point will land flush with many of the conservative evangelical Christians who make up his audience. “Lack of ‘purity’ in a First Lady is unforgivable,” she writes. The ‘First Man’s’ impurity (so long as it is heterosexual) can be given a pass.” In other words, in the world of the Christian right, what’s bad for the gander is infinitely worse for the goose.

It’s a hard proposition to test. In politics, outrage follows no logic save politics itself — Dobson may simply prefer Santorum’s hard-line stance on immigration to Gingrich’s somewhat gentler view. Or, to put it another way, would Dobson have swatted Sarah Palin with the same heavy hand had she won Todd away from his second wife? However Dobson’s attack may affect her husband’s bid for the presidential nomination, Callista Gingrich’s story is one that Catholics may soon have to start taking seriously.

To hear Catholic social critics tell it, American society turned into Sodom and Gomorrah sometime in the 1960s, and shows no sign of turning back. In large part, feminism, in all its forms and waves, is to blame. Rod Dreher’s condemnation of Stephen Daldry’s Academy Award-winning film The Hours features all the relevant tropes. It’s a “feminist film,” because Laura Brown, its heroine, abandons her family in pursuit of personal fulfillment, and doesn’t particularly blame herself for it. “We are meant to sympathize with this existential heroine instead of seeing her for what she is: a selfish, cold-hearted bitch who walked out on a decent man and two little children to go off in search of herself,” Dreher fumes. The essay’s title calls the film “An Apologia for Evil.”

Laura Brown defected from domesticity in the 1950s. Among women pundits, there seems to be a general consensus that the clock shouldn’t be turned completely back, nor all the toothpaste returned to the tube. Caitlin Flanagan has, at least according to Ann Hulbert, conferred on herself a kind of prophethood for having it all in a way neither traditional housewives nor feminists could ever have dreamed. “Thanks in part to a husband with a big paycheck, [Flanagan] works cozily from home, on hand for her now preteen twin boys, and in command of a panoply of household help…she scrutinizes the selfish pretensions and self-defeating contradictions that sprout like marigolds in affluent American mothers’ hearts and hearths.”

Flanagan’s ideas and delivery may have “ginned up a catfight” or two, as Hulbert puts it, but she’s not going away. Her contributing editorship at the Atlantic, her two books, her occasional spot on Colbert’s couch all attest that her collage of tradition and innovation is finding a receptive audience.

The Catholic blogosphere, at least, is filling up with women who are like Flanagan in the sense that they defend tradition, but do so in voices seasoned by modernity. Some have even violated the norms Dreher upholds (though not not a Laura Brownish degree), but repent with more brio, with more swagger, than tradition would likely have afforded them. At the Crescat, Katrina Fernandez, a divorced single mother, rails against feminism. On Shirt of Flame, Heather King, a self-described “ex-falling-down drunk,” calls following Christ a “metaphorical orgasm.” Margaret of Cortona they ain’t.

Callista Gingrich fits very neatly into this matrix. On the traditional side, she appears in public wearing triple strands of pearls, plus the helmetlike hairdo Amanda Marcotte believes could cut cheese. She’s written a children’s book, Sweet Land of Liberty, featuring an elephant named Ellis who “travels through American history, delivering lessons in rhyming couplets.” She has said she’d use the first lady’s platform to promote music education — “precisely the kind of uncontroversial passion that plays well with everyone,” according to Ariel Levy.

On the modern side — well, Callista’s husband has denied he asked his previous wife, Marianne, for an open marriage. Nevertheless, Callista has testified that she and Newt began their affair seven years before marrying. Now, a bare dozen years after the marriage, here she is, singing in the choir of the National Basilica, proudly bucking for first lady, and looking like she wouldn’t be caught dead at midnight in sackcloth.

Her role in Newt’s conversion looks like a new twist on woman’s old role as witness and redeemer. After the two married, reports Time Magazine, Newt “Gingrich found himself dragged to church whenever they traveled.” Callista, he says, is “adamant that we go to Mass.” This is pretty much what Clothilde of Burgundia did for Clovis, King of the Franks, back in the 5th century — only Clovis and Clothilde didn’t, in the interest of personal fulfillment, begin as illicit lovers or take advantage of generous divorce laws. Also, Newt hasn’t taken an axe to anyone for demanding more than his fair share of treasure, though God knows that could change.

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The Accidents of Appearance

January 12, 2012 By Max Lindenman 14 Comments

If you want to quit worrying about your looks, there are worse places to be than the Catholic Church.

That’s a broad statement — probably overbroad, and probably over-positive. Naomi Wolf once saluted Islamic dress as a liberator of women from the “intrusive, commodifying, basely sexualising Western gaze,” and from the tyranny of mass-media beauty standards. Her caveat, that “choice is everything” when it comes to the advantages of wearing hijab, appears as an afterthought. Wolf barely considers that family and societal pressures can stack the deck in favor of custom to the point where bucking it becomes as unrealistic an option as living in a tree.

So’s not to repeat her mistake, I’ll say up front — physical beauty and Catholic culture are in a complex relationship. I just happen to have showed up at the right time in my life to get the better end of the deal.

For me, beauty’s always been an add-on: I could look good if I put the time and money into it. At a couple of points in my life, when I was willing and able to observe the workout schedule of a convicted murderer (taking cigarette breaks between wide-grip pulldowns and bent-over rows), I sculpted myself into a midget adonis. One of those spells coincided with a financial rebound I enjoyed just after beginning my catechesis. After securing the L.A. Fitness membership, I frosted my tips and bought a fine collection of striped Oxfords. If I’d lived on the other side of Papago Park (and had had a much more sociable nature), I could have carried on a bromance with the title character of the Blobots’ “I’m a Big Douche (at the Scottsdale Bars).”

Most of the people most involved with the community were blissfully dowdy. These included many of the younger people. My initial home parish attracted many students, professors and administrators from the local unviersity who dressed according to the traditions of academia, that is, as though they chose their outfits in pitch blackness to give their incandescent light bulbs a break. For the most part, not even those who’d entered the professions preened themselves. Birks, khakis, perhaps a spare tire of bicycle width — these seemed the marks of a man with his eye on heaven.

The women were some of the palest — should I say fairest? — I’d ever seen in the state of Arizona. For a person of my particular ancestry, I’m very ignorant about jewelry, but they didn’t seem to wear much, apart from a crucifix or a wedding ring.

My mother tells me there used to be something called the Catholic Schoolgirl Slouch. “Once you grew a bosom, you were supposed to hide it,” she says, her choice of the word “bosom” giving the game away. “The easiest way to do that was to clutch your schoolbooks and pretend you had osteoperosis.” Whether the weight of Catholic culture was pressing any of these people — men or women — into a kind of psychological slouch, I couldn’t tell. It’s a difficult thing to winkle out in polite conversation. But, like Naomi Wolf skipping through the souk in hijab and abbaya, I found a kind of freedom in the company of low-maintenance people. When I lost the energy (and, perhaps more importantly, the car) to hit the weights obsessively, I sensed I’d found a place where all the disfiguring transfers of inches wouldn’t be such a big deal.

At least as far as my own particular niche — the Catholic media — is concerned, it really seems not to be. Yes, the founding father of Catholic televangelism was Fulton Sheen, with his head of wavy hair. But then, the founding mother was Mother Angelica, with her…well, bless her heart. Fathers Groeschel and Pacwa look like guys you might see behind the lectern in any university classroom. (The beards help.) From what I can tell, most of my closest blogosphere colleagues and I fall pretty close together on the great Beauty Curve. None of us needs to wear a bag on his head, but none of us is going to be posing for Praxiteles anytime soon. That’s a medium I can be happy with.

So bully for me. It’s not that simple, of course. The Catholic Schoolgirl Slouch is just the dwarf daughter of the cilice, the discipline, the extended fast and the monk’s pallet. That’s an unnerving tower of baggage. But then, the world outside the Church has baggage of its own. Deborah E. Rhode, Stanford’s Ernest W. MacFarland Professor of Law, writes that between 12 to 16 percent of workers believe that they have been discriminated against purely on the basis of their looks. That percentage, she says, “is in the same vicinity, or greater, than those reporting gender, racial, ethnic, age, or religious prejudice.”

Judging by the results of studies conducted by Biddle and Hammersch, this 12 to 16 percent may well know what it’s talking about. Government interviewers in Canda and the United States collected data on the incomes, occupations and backgrounds of a sample of working men, whose looks they then rated on a five-point scale. Those rated “homely” earned 9 percent less than the average; those rated “handsome” earned 32 percent more. In a longitudinal study published four years later, the same researchers found correlations between looks and income among graduates of a top (unnamed) law school.

It makes a kind of sense, then, that some segments of the Church seem to be promoting an unofficial Catholic aesthetic, a house style, so to speak. On its website, Chastity.com, which declares “The New Sexual Revolution is Here,” features photos of young people so perfect-looking, they might have gotten lost on their way to Brigham Young University. One of its chief spokespeople, former America’s Top Model contestant Leah Darrow, calls herself the “Faithful Fashionista.” Far from trivializing looks in relation to any other quality, Darrow affirms: “At times, clothes are the only visible clues to our personalities and even our beliefs. Today, clothes have become a means for one human to evaluate another.”

On the face of it, what Darrow’s selling is modesty; implicitly, she’s promoting a particular kind of name-brand, put-together modesty. She hasn’t said that beauty is next to godliness, and would surely deny believing it if asked. Still, human nature being what it is, I would be surprised if no one in her target audience conflated the two qualities. It would be a shame if doubles for Darrow (and now, for Mark Wahlberg) started rising to the top in Catholic ministries, social services agencies and universities. I’d hate to see the Slouch — or whatever the male equivalent might be — replaced with a strut. Lest anyone forget, on the road to Emmaus, they were walking.

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