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Be a Man

Scotte Burns


We rode into San Francisco on “the 101” as it’s known in California parlance, pulling over at a cool little hippie coffee shop en route to a local hostel. Arlo Guthrie’s Motorcycle Song greeted us as we creaked over the wooden floors, scooting into a booth with a view of the empty stage floor in the corner. Nearby, a young father in tie-dye and a man-bun played with his toddler son on an old crocheted rug. Their game involved a toy truck and dinosaur and featured lots of pretend chases and growling and giggling. We smiled over our mugs of exotic herbal tea as this simple and yet profound expression of love evoked so many others we’ve encountered on the road:


A muscular, gay, Hispanic fellow high-fived his teammates in Philadelphia as they all offered good-natured insults over one another’s lack of basketball skills. 



An elderly Chinese erhu player in Boston laid down his instrument and tossed coins from his tip jar into a fountain with his granddaughter. 



A young black shop worker in Taos shared a giant cookie with us, misting up a bit as he told us he loved everyone - and meant it. 



The memories of these very different men sharing their loves joined the giggles from the floor of the coffeeshop, leading me to wonder whether there are any consistent and unwavering rules about being a man these days. What does it mean?

Looking for an answer, I had to go look back a ways. 


Scotte - 1970ish
Scotte - 1970ish

As a kid, I thought that I knew what being a man meant, growing up for a time around motorcycles and bikers. Before he left and eventually drank, lied, and smoked himself to death, my father went through a period where he loved dirt bikes especially, screaming up and down the Colorado foothills on a bright red Hodaka Super Rat.

Dad on the SuperRat.
Dad on the SuperRat.

Joe Murray, his drinking and riding buddy next door - a man often referred to by the Lakewood police and others as “Jesus in a dirty t-shirt” - preferred chopped BSA’s and Triumphs, the occasional Harley Panhead making an appearance in front of his garage-turned-repair shop-and-drug-den. There was a fellow named Rex who lived up the street and seldom visited but was held in something like reverence by the regular Joe’s Garage denizens because someone said he was a Hell’s Angel. Even at seven or eight, I knew that was a dangerous big deal.

Joe Murray.
Joe Murray.

It was the age of Bronson and Vietnam. Saturday’s started with Thunderbirds and All-Star Wrestling, finishing with Gunsmoke and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., while in between we played lawn darts and army, pelting one another with BB guns and throwing dirt clod grenades, mimicking what we thought real men did.

 

One summer, Joe Murray blew himself ass-backward over our fence while slugging Jack Daniels and throwing M-80’s into the street. He just waited a little long on the burn of that last one. The next week, Joe dumped his bike on the twisty highway coming down the mountain roads from the old Central City mining town. He was a walking scab for a month as the road rash made him look painfully like The Amazing Colossal Man after the atomic blast had peeled his skin away. Joe never became Colossal, though. Probably better for everyone.

The Amazing Colossal Man, 1957
The Amazing Colossal Man, 1957

I thought they were all tough guys, real men, and that many people lived that way. Life’s like that. What we get used to becomes normal by definition and must therefore be the way life is for other people too. So, I figured most men were normally like that. A few years later, though, mom decided that normal needed to change, wearying of Dad’s violent chaos and liquored-up antics. The bullet he put into Joe’s house as he drunkenly chased her across the yard was the last straw, I guess. You gotta draw the line somewhere. 


It was brave of her to stand up to Dad afterward, and that kind of personal courage is something I didn’t understand until much later. I guess I just got used to Mom’s courage until that became normal to me too. It turned out that she was more of a man than he’d ever been, and more of a woman than he’d ever deserved. 


After Dad staggered off, it became pretty apparent that life hadn’t been normal, after all. Most of those “biker” dudes weren’t Charles Bronson or Peter Fonda, after all. They weren’t even bikers, really. Most of them were just boozy assholes with something to prove, though they didn’t know exactly what. So, I started paying closer attention to other people’s “normals” and how their men acted. I worked out that the Apollo astronauts weren’t just storied television heroes but might also be flawed men like those I already knew. They just worked a lot harder, stayed a bit cleaner, and saw things a little clearer than Dad’s drinking buddies had. It was a sobering realization, and I started to apply the resulting new reality scale to everyone. My view of what being a man meant began to change, but without a new model to replace the old.

This April 1968 file photo shows the first sergeant of A Company, 101st Airborne Division, guiding a medevac helicopter through the jungle foliage to pick up casualties suffered during a five-day patrol near Hue, Vietnam, April 1968. (AP Photo/Art Greenspon)
This April 1968 file photo shows the first sergeant of A Company, 101st Airborne Division, guiding a medevac helicopter through the jungle foliage to pick up casualties suffered during a five-day patrol near Hue, Vietnam, April 1968. (AP Photo/Art Greenspon)

Meanwhile, body bags came home from Vietnam on the news in the evening, as America shockingly lost the war in so many ways, no matter how soothing Walter Cronkite made bullshit like “peace with honor” sound. Then the president resigned, even though he “wasn’t a crook.” As it turned out, even the men in charge of things were capable of conniving in the dark and licking at human souls in a way I’d never dreamt before, and I felt like I was the only one my age who gave a shit sometimes. And so, I discovered cynicism before I even knew what the word for it was. 

 

Then something genuinely epic happened. Mom married a cowboy. Well, she didn’t marry him all at once. She dated him for a while first. Mom’s dating was a part of “normal” that I’d never even wildly considered, but I was willing to give it a go after she brought this fella home. For some reason, I started actually talking to him. I showed him a model of a T-34 jet trainer and spoke to him about the disappearance of the wishbone formation from football, asking him about trucks and stuff about which I figured men talked. He looked at my mom and said, “There’s nothing dumb about this kid.” I liked that.

QB Sweep Play-Wishbone Formation
QB Sweep Play-Wishbone Formation

As I moved into my teenage years, though, I dissed him pretty soundly too. He was a redneck, and I was a longhair, and that’s just the way it needed to be because everybody - meaning me - knew I was smarter than him and everyone like him.

 

Like most things, that changed, too. As we grew older together, the distance between us closed until I could finally see both of us for all we really were: Two men trying to do all any of us can: our best to make sense of it all and do right. My coming to see that cowboy for the man of simple integrity and humble wisdom he is allowed me to love him more than I would if I had simply kept on idolizing or dismissing him. I’ve heard that the greatest gift a man can offer his children is to love their mother, and his doing that made him my best model for what a man should be. It was a metamorphic choice, rippling through our lives to lap the shores of kids and grandkids and beyond.  

Cowboy and granddaughter.   
Cowboy and granddaughter.   

In that change - and in the embrace of the dreadlocked hippie mom who joined that boy and his dad on the coffee shop floor - I found my answer. 


Seeing the different men I’ve known and those we’ve met along my and Toni’s many roads, I respect most those men with personal strength, integrity, and a sense of honor and responsibility. But the thing that defines the best of men is the same thing that brings out the best of us all as humans - a deep devotion to love. 


Loves of our children, of our partners, of our homes, and of one another. What’s in a man’s head, his shirt sleeves, his pants, or his wallet doesn’t define a great man. It’s that game of trucks and dinosaurs on the floor, the look he gives his mate, and the patience he shows while other men learn what he already knows.


A real man loves.


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