HUMOR

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My wife and I recently visited a technical high school with our son, and in the Construction and Building Trades area, we ran into masculinity trouble.

The moment we stepped into the vast and noisy workshop, we were met by the workshop’s ruler: a big man sporting a big plaid shirt tucked aggressively into prophylactically tight jeans, a man born with two big pencils, one stuffed behind each shapely ear, a man barely keeping within the lines of himself, standing ramrod straight up out of ten-gallon boots, and the brunt of him was held back from erupting into huge nudity by a belt as big as a tool belt, because it was a tool belt.

I want to call him Mr. Zeppelin Penis Johnson, but that wasn’t his name.

His name was Mr. Manful.

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He introduced himself to my son: “I am Mr. Manful.” Then he reached out to shake hands.

My son shook his hand, which prompted Mr. Manful to say,

“No.”

He immediately broke out of the handshake, held out his hand again, and said, “When you shake a man’s hand, you grip hard and look him in the eye.”

This prompted my wife to make a sound in her throat, which is the sound of her fury mixed with disgust. I don’t know how she produces the sound. I’ve tried and failed. It sounds like she’s got a rock-tumbler in the back of her throat. It sounds like the growl of a wolf gargling the bones of another wolf. Usually, she’s aiming this sound at me, but that day, it was all for Mr. Manful.

But my son took the critique well, something he never does at home, and re-shook.

“Better,” said Mr. Manful.

Then he turned to me.

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I’d been expecting this. I’d been slapping myself hard in the face from both sides in preparation. I’d been juicing, jack jumping, shaving and oiling my bits, seizing and shaking hundreds of hands, and staring into the scariest eyes I could find online: the eyes of sharks, serial killers, and giant sock monkeys.

Out went Mr. Manful’s hand. Out went mine to meet it. Our hands raced toward convergence like hands playing chicken, like two hands reaching out to put everything on the line, a line warping toward me by the pressures of Mr. Manful’s manflammation.

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Before we made contact, I knew what great hand shakers know, that I only had one chance to get this right, to prove my power to my son, to Mr. Manful, and to my wrath-gargling wife, who was now rolling her eyes so violently they almost cast her equilibrium to the floor like Moses throwing down the law.

In other words, my fate would be decided quickly. You have only fractions of a second to react correctly once you touch handflesh.

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If you squeeze too soon, you don’t get all the hand. You squeeze only a small portion, as if that’s all you can take, and this sends the message, “Behold, I am weak.”

If you make good contact but squeeze too late, you get squeezed first, and then you have to squeeze your way out, squeeze through the squeeze. Impossible.

“Dear everyone and their mother, I am weak.”

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But something else happened to me.

The moment I made contact, I knew I was in trouble. This man’s hand wasn’t shaped like the hands I’d trained with.

It wasn’t just wide and long. It was the thickest hand ever. Vindictively bloated with no-nonsense muscle. It was like shaking someone’s hand if their hand was a basketball with fingers.

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I did my best. But my best only prompted Mr. Manful to twist his toned lips into a disappointed smirk.

If he’d been my friend, I would have said, “False start!” then gone in for a regrip.

But he wasn’t my friend, so he cast my hand aside and reached for the hand of my wife.

She grabbed on and squeezed so hard she burst a seam in her collar.

As a result, Mr. Manful’s balls twinkled with mirth, his eyeballs, and he said, “Now there’s someone who knows how to shake a hand!”

My exasperated spirit surged up within me, slamming against the roof of my head, then falling back down inside, all the way down to my doll-sized shoes.

In the aftermath, we toured the workshop, left Mr. Manful behind, toured the school’s other programs, then went home.

And for the rest of the day, I conducted intense discussions with myself.

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“Makes perfect sense,” I said, “a person’s worth should be based on how well they grab and squeeze one of your appendages. But I have another way that’s equally good. Why don’t we Karate chop our hands into each another’s armpits when we meet then mash chins and noses together while screaming our names? Our culture is BULLSHIT!”

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My wife knocked on the bathroom door. “Are you still in there?”

“Nothing!”

“Who are you talking to?”

“I wasn’t.”

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She sighed. “Your hands are fine. Okay? They’re perfectly normal hands.”

“Just normal?”

“They’re great hands. Very Symmetrical. Will you come out now?”

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“It’s a trick!” I shouted. “A trap!”

“What is?”

“His hands! No one can shake those hands right.”

“I did.”

“That was luck! His hands are the wrong shape! You can’t shake a basketball!”

“What?”

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“No one can beat him, and he knows it! O, he loves it. Our whole introduction system works perfectly for him. He conquers every time. There’s no contest! If only I could reach out and grip him with my genius.”

“Your what?”

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“Then he’d feel my might! It would be like shaking hands with the moon! With the entire EARTH!”

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“Why is this such a problem for you?”

“Because I am powerful! This is generally known in my circles!”

“Okay, what would you like to do about it?”

“I need Mr. Manful to understand his hands are only that big because he squeezes lumber all day. I could do that too. Maybe I will.”

“So you’re going to start squeezing lumber.”

“Hands can grow,” I said. “It’s proven!”

“Why don’t you squeeze lumber with your big genius until you figure out none of this matters.”

I shouted, “Well, why don’t you squeeze…!” I stopped there because the comeback revealed no more words to me.

In the silence, I heard my wife’s threatening gargle. I winced. Then the gargle grew quieter as she walked away.

I was alone.

Was I lonely?

Because I had work to do.

I gave myself a good long and hard look in the mirror, then I closed my eyes, visualized lumber, gripped it with my great big genius…

and squeezed.

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