Moodswing - You be the Man
A whole new definition for bravery
When I was 5 I used to fantasize about fainting into the arms of another man, preferably during a dangerous battle of some kind. I don’t know what the says about me, but there it is; I thought the ultimate was to flat out faint in the middle of everything and be carried away from danger like a burdensome sack of maggots.
I based this on about 700 sci-fi movies from the ’50s and ’60s I watched in which exactly that happened; the female character was always fainting into the arms of the male character, who then somehow had to whisk her to safety while at the same time fighting the space monster that had an old-time TV for a head.
So my sister and I would practice. We’d feign rushing somewhere only to be confronted by the sight of something so odious our only recourse would be to gingerly place the back of our hands to our foreheads and then collapse into a dainty pile right there on the indoor-outdoor carpeting. There we’d lie with our eyes closed, hissing at each other, “You be the man!” “No, you!”
Nobody wanted to be the man. We all just wanted to be saved.
Eventually we just got ourselves up. “Ain’t nobody coming to save you,” Lucinda called from the kitchen. Lucinda was the third childcare provider my mother had hired that year. The first one, Mrs. Perry, had to leave us to care for her husband, a trash man who eventually died from an infected cut on his hand. The second lasted for as long as it took her to knock on the door and hear our dog, Echo, barking. By the time my mother answered, the lady was already halfway back to her car. “I don’t like dogs,” she yelled over her shoulder.
Then came Lucinda, who had four kids of her own. She brought them with her to our house when she was on duty, from her 19-year-old daughter to her 7-year-old son, Lucas, including all their friends.
That’s how I figured out boys don’t fantasize about saving women. They fantasize about saving each other. Lucas and his friends would enact big battle scenes in which they performed feats of bravery to be recounted with awe by their buddies. And they were, like, wounded in these fantasies, they’d been shot in the shoulder or something, yet still they were carrying their comrades away from danger. There was much yelling and sweating and gritting of teeth, and in the end they would all kind of collapse into a heap on the safe side of everything. Then they’d tend to each other, lauding the actions of their heroes, until it was time to pack on the imaginary ammunition again.
They were all very brave, I thought. Later Lucinda got fired because she left us in the care of her teenage daughter one day, whose idea of babysitting was to lock us out on the porch while she stayed inside and balled her boyfriend. My mother found out because the neighbors had heard us begging to be let back inside all afternoon. I was kind of sorry to see Lucinda go. I liked being surrounded by brave boys who saved each other.
“Ain’t nobody coming to save you,” Lucinda said, and she was right. So I started having fantasies of a different kind. I was going to wake up every morning and conquer things, fell demons. I was going to be all kinds of crap. I made a list. I was going to hunt lions on safari in Africa. I was going to build mud huts in Borneo. I was going to become a war correspondent. I was going to traverse the Amazon in a cargo liner.
But I wasn’t even that old before reality hit me in the face like a frozen mackerel. First, my grade-school teachers wouldn’t even let me wear pants to school, and a lion hunter looks pretty lame in a skirt. Then there was the other basic, everyday drippings of sorrow and disappointment that clung to the walls of my household like moss. My father soon lost his job, then we lost that house and had to move like migrant workers over the next decade, hardly ever staying long enough to fully unpack. I got so tired of walking into classrooms full of strange faces in the middle of the school year that one day I simply tied up like an over-exercised showhorse and I wouldn’t do it anymore. I stopped going to school all together, and wasn’t missed.
I got myself a boyfriend, a handsome heroine addict named Scott, and a job at a cocktail lounge where they didn’t blink when I told them I was 23. From there I made just about every wrong turn you can imagine making, and I felt the fire in me start to die like a treasured pet abandoned on a desert highway. In the end, I did not hunt lions in Africa, I did not build mud huts in Borneo and I did not traverse the Amazon in a cargo liner. But, hey, I’m here. Ain’t nobody come to save me, and still I am here with a whole new definition for bravery. Bravery is the soft voice inside you that won’t die, the voice that whispers in your ear each morning and says, “All right, let’s try this again.”