Middled

Some guys push out their bellies after they’ve drunk too much water or beer and laugh at their superficial pregnancies.

Some guys dress in drag – long, flowing dresses, or kinky boots and stockings paired with a mini-dress, one casual market shopping, the other tarted up for a Friday night.

Some guys have their nails painted that one bored night by their girlfriends and keep the polish on until Monday morning, though they wear shoes.

Some guys don’t.

Some guys were their mother’s best friend, their mother’s little golden child growing up, dressed in pastel blue, but sometimes red when they wanted to pretend to put out fires. Some guys wanted to handle a gun and arrest someone; some guys dive-rolled and dreamt in camouflage khaki; others got into the nurses – as doctors – quite early; and others secretly liked hearts and flowers and stars and pink.
Some guys saw their fathers as much bigger dicks, literally, and consequentially stepped up to bat when the ball was thrown. Some guys went through sporting seasons in weeks, some slapped arses, and some did bicep curls before they’d reached puberty. Some guys wonder why they can’t keep up, and turn their attention elsewhere, like the piano or guitar, or chess, or even ballet. Some guys will end up hating dad; some will end up hating mum.

Some guys are the apple of the eyes of both, or grandpa or Nan, or the year eight P.E. teacher. Some guys try so hard to keep the peace, they do anything to satiate the appetites of others and lose themselves in the process. Some guys have girlfriends. Some guys have boyfriends. Some guys have both and confuse love with passing lust and some confuse boys with girls on business trips to Thailand.

Some guys know what they want, when they want it, and how, and will take it from the world, until it’s gone and move on to another planet. This is usually Venus, where some guys poke around, failing to find its riches. Some guys remain on Mars and wonder why no one comes to visit.

Some guys get jobs that require a scribbled note and nods; some guys get jobs that open up people and save hedge funds; others are good with their hands and build bigger dicks; and still others will become academics who can point this out to friends and snigger, whilst lighting cigars.

Some guys get jobs that require suits, and high fives, and cars that act like calendars. Some guys work alone and keep a far off look in their eye, crop dusting their horizons. Some guys run on stress and anxiety, and then pills on weekends so that they can numb the void they created living up to imagined expectations.

Some guys find themselves at water coolers surrounded by middle-aged women.

Some guys are the youngest slab of meat with a dick in a cubicle, pushing papers around, diligently keeping their mug separate in the staff room. Some guys go to Japan or China and go to heady heights of objectification and alpha-male status trips, while others do work placement in a primary school in the lower-class suburbs of home.

Some guys fall into teaching not because they weren’t talented enough for artistic endeavour, and not because they have a penchant for the beauty of youth, or clichés like shaping children’s minds. Some guys enjoy imparting knowledge to others; some guys were champions of quiz nights. Some have genuine empathy for people and want to have those exchanges on a less superficial level than as bartender or outfitter.

Some guys sit at their desk overhearing the conversations at the water cooler.
Those middle-aged women talking about human exchanges. Those women talking about their concerns, their husbands, their children, their family, their headaches. Those women talking about this and that and passive-aggressively putting themselves down to score a compliment; or siding with someone to provoke gossip with the best of intentions.

Some guys listen and learn and navigate their way around the female mind. Some guys end up every woman’s son.

Some guys watch those women and wonder who those women could have been. Those women who shone on stage, but once strayed too close to the spotlight of a particularly bad man and were burnt: rolled up their red carpet and spent the next phase of life shying from attention. Those women, yo-yoing through seasons, depressed in cake, elated in brown rice and vice versa. Those women, who knew at twelve that this is where they wanted to be, so don’t allow another thought to enter, and control every whiteboard marker sitting at the bottom of the whiteboard – all their caps facing west. Those women who speak, not just to the students, but to everyone, in a girly voice; those women who have dolls sitting on their beds still.

Then there are those women who, through an organic and gradual process came to the job when they felt ready for it. Those women who dress appropriately for their age, work part-time to support that other job based on passion, raise children with their soul mate partner – not necessarily married. Those women who wake up and laugh at wrinkles; those women who don’t take part in office slander, who just find a good friend among the fraying doilies and severe buns to share lunch with at that lovely, new patisserie with the real French baker, with whom she speaks French.

Some guys look at these particular women and see women.

They see: a body filled with enjoyment and contentment, stretch marks from children and growing up. They see: appearance taken care of, but not to the standards of paparazzi flash bulb, ‘just flicking through at the checkout’, fake-nails, fake-tan, fake-heart flake out. Some guys will see a sexually active being, aware of every goose bump on well-worn, but not breaking, skin. Some guys see these women and their hearts will not be reminded of their mothers. Some guys hear these women and they don’t feel like they’re being mothered. Some guys might fall in lust, others in love. Some guys will want to stand at the photocopier just to smell them and that would be enough. Some guys picture drizzling olive oil between these women’s legs.

Some guys don’t want to fuck these women. Some guys want to be these women.

Some guys imagine what it would be like to climb into their skin.

Some guys look down at their own bodies and see dicks and pubic hair and empty spaces where there would be muscle if they ever cared to do a push up. Some guys look at their bodies and see tan lines and vessels that carry no greater worth than their salary. Some guys feel frustrated that the blood to either head determines who to keep close and who to push away, though if they ever organised a conference they’d find two heads work better than one, somewhere midway, in that cobwebbed cavity called a cage. Some guys don’t want to be a woman; they just want to be those women.

Some guys push out their bellies after they’ve drunk too much water or beer and laugh at their superficial pregnancies: some guys push out their bellies and pretend that they’re carrying twin boys.

Some guys wonder what their cravings would be and start looking up baby names. Some guys lay off the alcohol and cigarettes and imagine life waking up to a man who still can’t believe his luck, and revel in a wardrobe filled with colours and cuts chosen with genuine personal taste – not limited to black and white, black and grey, black and navy, navy and grey.

Some guys want to know what rubbing creams and oils into their skin feels like to a person so connected to it. Some guys daydream what life as these women is like: raising teenaged boys to be men like their father, not pretending to like cricket, but giving them a window to the world that exists outside of what ‘boys prefer to do’.

Some guys want so desperately not to have to pretend all the time.

Some guys want to have acquired a well of empathy that is not frowned upon if it overflows.

Some guys want to feel cascading hair falling behind them as they’re lifted onto the laps of those that love them.

Some guys want to chat. Some guys want to smell ylang ylang and know what that means. Some guys want to sink into baths of milk and honey and eat whole boxes of chocolate without the distraction of video games or having to high five a mate and belching loudly.

Some guys forget themselves when these women show them where they keep the key to happiness. Some guys forget what happiness is. They see these women and want to know themselves like they do. To know that fucking is good, but to understand the context in which it is.

Some guys return home and turn on their electronic reasons for escape and distance themselves from their bodies – not female or male – just inconsequence, until the doctors tell them ‘it’s over’ because some guys ignore warning signs.

Some guys ignore warning signs like: pecs covering a fragile heart; jolliness compensating for races lost; sweeping emotional dust under the lungs, pancreas, prostate, liver, and brain. Some guys try to control it all, making supermen out of little boys, and get confused when time consumes even them.

Those women will never look at those boys.

Some guys befriend those women because they are those men who meet them there – at the water cooler, talking about ideas and action; thought and feeling.


© Sam Rodgers 2009