It's a particular conceit of mine that I don't have stereotypical male behaviors. I don't ogle women. I essentially couldn't care less about cars as long as they run. I can put a new roll of toilet paper in the holder. I'm not afraid to cry at sad movies or use coupons. I cook, sweep, shop, mop, and help with homework. I am, then, like Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way.
Except I won't ask for help. I won't ask where the soy sauce is in the grocery store, I won't ask how to spell a word, I won't ask for advice, and the day I ask for directions is the day you put me in a dress and call me girly boy. I have my limits.
I was in trouble, though. I had a broken lawnmower and knee-high grass and weeds with an attitude. Procrastination had led me to a sunny Saturday with work to do and no tools. I needed help and so called my friend Paul, and I was happy to have a reason.
I met Paul in the summer of 1980, when we were doing repertory theater in northern Arizona. Looking back, it seems now we spent less time interpreting Sam Shepherd and Noel Coward and more doing manual labor, and cleaning out a prop room late one night Paul and I started talking and we've never stopped.
I don't know how it works. Love gets defined by music and poetry, but friendship has a thousand beginnings and it's hard to find a constant. You grow up together, you work together, you share interests: Lots of reasons to be friends, but sometimes something just clicks.
We completed each other's sentences and made each other laugh. We shared a mutual fear-and-fascination appreciation of our leading lady, an Oscar-winning actress who was past her prime but could still intimidate with the best of them. She was Irish and loud, and she hated the fact that she was stuck in the boonies with kids doing basically theater for tourists.
"Marx Brothers material!" was one of her favorite comments about our lack of professionalism, along with "This is amateur night in Dixie!" These became mantras for us, Paul and I, as we spent the hours after rehearsal in the Monte Vista Hotel bar, alienating the rest of the crew as our two-person monologue jumped from subject to subject.
"This is Marx Brothers material!" we'd yell, ordering another pitcher of beer and lining up Billy Joel on the jukebox. We entertained and inspired each other, and that one summer we were inseparable.
He married his college sweetheart and I married mine. We landed in the Pacific Northwest, both of us dreaming of maybe starting a theater company or writing a play about a fading actress called "Amateur Night In Dixie," and eventually learning that responsibility, like grass, grows regardless of your inattention. Real jobs and families happened along the way, and now thirty minutes apart with 20-plus years of friendship and I hadn't seen him in almost two years.
He brought his mower and weed trimmer and leaf blower and we did the job; three hours on a Saturday we both had found free, surprisingly, him with three boys on different baseball teams and me with work piling up.
We loaded the equipment back in his Suburban and stood in the sun and laughed at the gray in each other's hair. We griped that we hadn't had enough time to talk, how we didn't do this nearly often enough and needed to, the things we always say.
"How many springs and summers do we have left?" he asked suddenly, and I realized then that there is a poetry of friendship after all; it speaks of regret and laments time slipping through our fingers, and I resolved to work harder.
Maybe I'll ask him to help me with my deck or the blackberry bushes, or maybe we'll just find a bar like the Monte Vista that has pitchers of beer and Billy Joel on the jukebox.
"You may be right/I may be crazy" he sings, and the waitress will wonder what these two guys could be talking about so fast and so loud. Hours will pass and our cell phones will ring, our wives asking what we're doing when they really know, they must, after all these years.
This is Marx Brothers material, we think, life pulling us in so many directions when all we want is time to talk. We shake our heads and laugh and go home to our lawns and our kids, knowing our days and hours are numbered now but cherishing the company just the same as we always did, back when we had nothing but time.
