boyhood
How to get to new york, part six
A key difference to understand between boyhood and girlhood is that a person can only really understand boyhood for what it was once they’ve left it behind.
Whereas girlhood seems sustainable,—something to hold onto, to preserve, to move forwards with after having left its full aura,—attempting to hold on to boyhood feels like a fool’s errand; without checking it in its place boyhood seems to only be capable of particularly bad outcomes, callous personal fallouts. Boyhood feels catastrophic. That’s just to say, boyhood’s a form of immaturity in a way girlhood’s not. A person can only really talk about boyhood after the fact of whatever the anxious bounding bubbling feeling of what it was: and to be fair, it wasn’t much.
Because whatever boyhood is,—and i’m sure i’m not giving as succinct a definition as i could (if only i had worked on this essay for more than a day and a half!!),—the spirit behind it demands privacy above all, it demands a garden of eden, a college town, a high school, a small town to fully explore the limits of its wild, boundless, catastrophic confidence; a small pond or a small reef in a wide ocean where one can be as self centered as one possibly can for a period of four to ten years, to learn by blunt experience how others exist, how they hurt, and how it is to be hurt in return. This is boyhood’s primary mode, its primary problem. The phrase “boys will be boys” is a smokescreen. When boyhood is exposed to the light of public opinion, it wilts like a plum left in the sun.
This is unfortunately the reason there seems to be a dearth of “boyhood essays” here, and a dearth of sadboy fiction, or whatever. There’s been rising discourse on this topic recently by
, , , to name a few.1My good friend of six years is getting married in September2. This past weekend was his bachelor party. We had a pontoon rental waiting for us on Green Lake, a keg of spotted cow in the back of a small car, a cabin in the northwoods on some lake,—i don’t remember the name.
Matthias is the very first of my pandemic-era college roommates to get cuffed. It’s a radical feeling just being around. To be fair, he’s been with his fiancé for close to six years now. But still. A radical feeling.
In 2020, there were eight of us,—and one cat,—packed into a three story house in Madison for the pandemic. Whatever this past weekend was, much of it felt like an ode to that time in particular. During the pandemic we drank stupid amounts of alcohol, smashed hundreds of thrift CDs in the basement against the concrete walls, tripped in the attic, took shrooms on the roof, taped bottles of malt liquor to our hands and danced arm-in-arm to IRA songs on the back porch until someone in a halloween store cop outfit approached and announced that he was the “party police” to us up on the second floor porch.
“Stop that, no social gatherings,” he declared, and we made fun of him until he went away.
Anyways, this past weekend a couple of us drove up to the bachelor party together, stopped by Santos’s parents house and his mother made us an absurd number of turkey sandwiches. It felt strange leaving the city. I forgot how the country rolls itself outside passenger side windows.
And i was surprised anyone would rent a pontoon out to us. We didn’t look like we should be in charge of anything,—we’re dressed up more-or-less as expats from an inner city rave. None of us have driven a boat before. The rental company even gifted us a twenty pack of Busch lights before sending us off to the cool summer waves.
We spent some time driving around the lake, chasing seagulls off the water, full speed, VRrrrrr catching up, bounding up and down on top of sheets of water, catching spray on my tongue.
Near where our boat was anchored in the sandbank, a family played frisbee. Santos, the big hairy greek 25 year old who drove the boat, approached them and asked if they wanted competition. The old man quickly said, “not really,” adding “we have kids here.” And that was that. But wait,—aren’t we kids, too? Am I not? No. No, not anymore, i guess.
We soon enough lost one of the two anchors. Thankfully we had been anchored (or semi-anchored) at a sandbank in five foot water so we could clearly see the anchor and leap off the side with the empty carabiner and rope in hand to reattach the metal hunk underwater to be hauled up to the boat. Yo ho ho.
Midwestern watersport culture is strange. The number of joke pirate flags we saw around the lake felt absurd. Three people holding onto one another’s midriffs went bounding past on a single jetski. I’m unsure how the last person held on so well.
A couple small bar patios overhung the lake with wide docks and jetskis hanging onto the sides by what at a distance appeared to be merely threads, soft, small linkages holding the small vessel bobbing up and down. The few people at the patios, all of them men in wraparound shades, deeply red in the face wearing mauve and teal polos, sitting in the noon sunlight with no umbrellas to shield them, taking in the pure lake sun,—what do they think of boyhood today? Should i have asked them? Likely it’s nothing reassuring or helpful.
Perhaps it is a core part of boyhood to flirt with death, to flirt with the stupid decisions, to make living more dramatic by way of the contrast with its opposite.
I remember crawling through storm drains when I was 12 with my best friend at the time, Thomas Perez, out of sheer boredom and a stupid courage in the face of nothing at all, trying to map out the storm drains, trying to find secrets down there, trying to reenact Stephen King’s IT and face down evil underneath the sweat of small town America’s pavement.
The passages through the underside of the Mississippi streets felt cavernous, full of small spiders and bugs,—none of it could break through our thick shirts and pants. We had checked the weather beforehand to make sure there was no rain. If there had been rain that day, well i wouldn’t be here now.
We ventured in, headlamps on, and the concrete tubing became a bit smaller at each juncture, and we kept expecting the next manhole to be loose enough to push up emerge out of like we were the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but they never did. Every manhole was sealed on. And the passages became smaller until we were crawling, until we had to be on our bellies. “The next one,” i reassured shakily. “The next one will be open.”
In the moment i wasn’t as scared as i should have been. In the moment i had that elusive topic of this essay pumping through my veins; i had BOYHOOD, oh boy i had boyhood,—both of us did. And boyhood’s what had gotten us into the mess, but also it’s what got us out in the end.
We eventually recognized the impossibility of our goal, the sheer pointlessness of trying to emerge somewhere unusual,—the looking out through the storm drains at street level, hoping to surprise some poor soul walking their dog, became a childish, bland aspiration,—so we turned around on our stomachs in that tight concrete tube hundreds of feet from any out, and we weaseled our way back the way we came and we never acknowledged how if we had kept going that saturday afternoon… if we had kept going…
Northwoods lake, late afternoon, a bachelor party, end of an era. The anchor was lost in the lake. The anchor was lost to the waves. The bags were dropped. The bags were dropped. The balloon raised into the clouds, the stars were not far enough away to deter us.
Scraping, peeling across the lake, we made our way back to the Green Lake marina for the last time after having bobbed water for seven hours in the sun. Matthias lost his hat in the wind and we went back for it. He dived into the waves to grab it and bring it back to the boat. We all dived, then, into the 200 feet of water. Over and over again. We were together. The last light of the crucible of living together during the pandemic feels brighter than it ever has been despite Abe living now in New York3, despite Santos living now in some small mountain town in Colorado.
To think that in the watery parts of the world there are great beasts, awesome. To swim in their domain, divine.
Docking for the last time, we listened to Jimmy Buffet. Cheeseburger in Paradise? Masterpiece.
This time on the pontoon, the times the next day at the rental cabin, the time we drank a full keg and six handles of whiskey in seven hours out of solo cups, the time we took adderall as the sun set, the time we played drinking games that faded ever so gradually into one-on-one wrestling matches as the night spanned on,—all these times being isolated attempts to make our waning youth matter, to make the real real, to make our years of delinquent friendship mean something,—felt wonderful, profound, an opening, an unsheathing, an ending.
It’s now Thursday. There’s still Wisconsin lakemud between my toenails. I can’t seem to get it all out.
Boyhood will change with time. It’s been slow moving and clinging to the past (i mean, just look at the slavish devotion so many middle school and high school boys have towards joe rogan and andrew tate,—i’m not going to capitalize their names because i don’t respect them), but with time things will change. Boyhood and masculinity cannot remain in this desperate pingponging around the room forever.
I can’t help but imagine the trump shooter’s ideology is along similar lines to these,—it’s boyhood plain and simple. He was twenty, dejected, alone. He took a fucking stupid insane risk. The biggest risk possible4. He shot at a former president of the United States for seemingly no reason. But of course there was a reason. If he had left a manifesto, i would imagine it would say, simply, “anything.”
Just a boy being a boy.
I recall my AP Physics II class being taken for a tour of the TVA nuclear reactor,—we were allowed to see the actual control room and not the exact replica which tour groups are most often allowed to see,—and the only real impulse I felt during the lookaround was to sprint around the room and begin flipping up and down as many of the hundreds of switches and knobs on the wall as i could. It wasn’t a real thought; there was no intentionality, only raw feeling. Or at least done some serious damage.
These are all stupid things to do, let me be clear: to try and prove to ourselves we’re in control of our own adventure, here,—throwing ourselves to the shredder of the real,—doesn’t accomplish separation from life. We’re all meat at the end of the day. A long sigh punctuates the retrospective.
But the tides’ll change sure enough. Masculinity will change in the light of time. There’s a rawness in the exuberances of boyhood. I was maybe too critical at the start of this essay. I was maybe too critical above when i said the trump assassin was an expression of modern boyhood. These things are not all dour. Raw passion is needed in life, and in society; and perhaps the raw passions of boyhood are too raw, too out in the open, too callous and ugly for the endless cameras of today,—and thus boyhood feels pressed, pushed down upon when its only real mandate is to explore. If anything, it seems that boyhood is immensely uncomfortable when confronted directly. Boyhood itself is uncomfortable, clearly. But then again, so is everyone. There is an earnest goodness inside its equation of so many labels. There’s a loving kindness inside of it,—outside the part of it which feels so threatened,—which should be encouraged, within reason, of course.
Anyways, that’s all to say Call Me By Your Name is, in my mind, the perfect boyhood movie.5
Until next time,
xoxoxoxoxoxo,
briffin
Boyhood is Trending, about a boyhood essay, and Masculinity is not a Mass Product, respectively.
there will be a HTGTNY post about it, i’m sure
How to get there…. hmmm…
Further on this point: on the drive up to the northwoods, someone made a good point in that twenty years ago, this type of dejected, beatupon twenty-year-old would have shot up an elementary school and it’s much preferable that they would shoot at an 82 year old caricature of american decadence with authoritarian leanings running for the most powerful position in the world rather than a couple dozen eight-year-olds and their teachers. I can’t help but agree with the point. “Based,” i think i said, unfortunately.
Ok ok, Stand by Me might be the best boyhood movie.
Sticking one's head out of girlhood essays---stumbled upon this little miracle. I love your writing style. It's sharp without being austere, your description flashes through ludically, palpably in places, there's wit and the sense that the writer is smiling behind the screen whilst recalling some of these memories. I love the slight irreverence towards capital letters. It's all brilliant. Thank you. I hope you hold onto as much of your boyhood as you believe is sensible to, right to.
Thanks for the mention and the nice read. And regarding how boyhood vs. girlhood is valued, I'd also add that society values youth in men and women differently. So girlhood is a time to be fetishized and eternally yearned for, whereas boyhood's an unwanted metamorphic stage to be shed ASAP on the way to manhood.