TNS stands in solidarity with the trans community. As a show of support, today we are proud to reprint and celebrate the work of Silas Hansen.
A real man isn’t afraid of anything.
He has heard people say this his whole life, even when he was a kid, even back when he was still trying, desperately trying, to be happy as a girl—and later, too, after he told people the truth of his gender (“Just trying to help,” they would say)—so he knows it must be true: He shouldn’t be afraid of anything.
Except that there are so many things that are actually terrifying, like outer space—sometimes he can’t even look at the night sky without his heart racing because it never ends, it literally goes on forever, there are just stars and planets and solar systems out there, and who knows how many, and how could that not be terrifying?—and bats—because they carry rabies—and raccoons—for the same reason—and also the dark, because who knows what’s out there? Can we ever really be sure?
But he is definitely not afraid when he’s home alone at night, except when he accidentally reads something terrifying on the Internet or sees something on TV. He tells himself that the chances of falling victim to whatever he just read about online—killer bees, or a possible serial killer in southeastern Ohio, or maybe those mysterious lights over Los Angeles last week—are small, so unimaginably small, because it’s not like the scary things are hacking into his computer and looking to see what he's reading and then showing up just after he finishes the article . . . and yet he can’t help but immediately jump out of bed and go make sure all of the doors and windows are locked, just to be safe.
And he is definitely not afraid of spiders, because they’re more afraid of him than he is of them. Except when he sees one walk across his ceiling right before bed, and then he tries to smack it with a broom, and he’s not sure if he killed it or just made it angry and knocked it into his bed, so he has to go sleep on the couch until he can do laundry in the morning and make sure it’s really, absolutely, 100% not hiding within his sheets. Or when he reads about brown recluse spiders—again, on the Internet, the starting point for all fears—and then goes outside to mow his lawn, opens the garage door, and finds spider eggs on the floor, and so he declares that the garage is dead to him now, he simply doesn’t have one; if he looks out the windows on the back of his house he sees just his yard, and the alley behind it, and nothing else, especially not a building that used to be a garage where he absolutely will not be keeping his car this winter because it doesn’t exist.
A real man watches football.
He spends his weekends in his living room or in bars, wearing his team’s jersey while he drinks beer and yells at the TV. He gets upset—so upset he yells loud enough to scare his cat off the couch—when his team’s quarterback—their first real hope in years—is out for two weeks with a knee injury, and they put in the backup, a first-round draft pick who has never lived up to the hype, and he lets the Jaguars pick him off three plays in a row, and they go from 3–0 to 21–3 in just four minutes.
He sits on bar patios and friends’ front porches and in his dad’s friend’s living room, and he talks about football. He talks about the NFL Power Rankings in Week 7, and about the NCAA’s new play-off system, and about how the Cardinals / the Bengals / Clemson / Ohio State might do in the post-season this year. He holds a beer in one hand during these conversations—always a beer, or maybe some whiskey; he saves the red wine or the mixed drinks for some other time, for at home or at a different bar or around people who aren’t his Football Friends—and he makes sure his voice sounds lower, lower than when he gets called “ma’am” on the phone or in the McDonald’s drive-thru, and he makes sure not to talk so much with his hands when he says things like “third-down conversion” or “pass interference” or “three-and-out” and waits for the approving nod from the other guys.
When his social media feeds blow up with news of another football player accused of sexual assault, or another football player accused of domestic violence, or another coach who signs another player accused of sexual assault or domestic violence or assault and battery, or when another high school football player dies on the field or another one goes back in the game, even though he probably shouldn’t, he tries not to think too much about it. He tries to tell himself that he can like the game and dislike the players, that he can like the game and dislike the culture, that the culture can change, that the players understand the risks, and they’re adults. Because he likes football, that’s part of it, but even more than that, he doesn’t want to lose what watching football gives him: something to talk about with his father when they talk on the phone, something to talk about with other men that makes him feel like he’s part of the club, like he belongs there.
A real man knows how to do things around the house.
When he buys his first home, just after turning 28, he tells himself he’ll do it all: pull up the carpets and install new flooring and strip wallpaper and paint the walls and maybe even build a raised-bed vegetable garden in the backyard, where he can grow tomatoes and cucumbers and zucchini. He buys a house that needs a lot of work—cosmetic work, though, nothing in terms of the structure or plumbing or electrical, at least not that he can see—because he wants to do it all. He grew up in a house where his father did these things—built decks and front porches, tore down walls and built additions—but he never helped, never learned, and now he wants to prove that he can. He wants to prove it to everyone else, of course, but he mostly wants to prove it to himself.
But then he moves in and realizes the doors don’t close all the way—“probably because the house has settled,” his father says on the phone—and so he goes to the hardware store and buys a circular saw and the right blade to put in it and some clamps to hold the door steady as he cuts. He takes the door to the guest bedroom / office off its hinges and carries it to the dining room, where he can rest it on the table, and he tries to keep the door from hitting the walls, from getting stuck in the doorframes along the way, but he fails. The whole time, his hands are shaking because he’s never done this before, never used a tool more powerful than an electric drill to hang a coat rack or a picture frame. Once he gets the door on the table and clamps it down, he realizes his hands are shaking too much to hold the saw steady, so he grabs his laptop and watches circular saw tutorials on YouTube to try to convince himself he can do it.
Eventually, he works up the nerve to go back to the dining room, to plug in the saw, to hold it steady. He remembers to hold it with both hands, to start it before he presses the blade to wood just like they said in the videos, and somehow, holding his breath the whole time, he manages to trim off just shy of a quarter inch.
Later, after his heartbeat returns to normal and he confirms that he didn’t cut off any fingers, he carries the door back to the guest room / office, hitting it against the walls and the doorframes along the way, and puts it back on its hinges. He tries not to think about the big gap between the top of the door and the doorframe, since he accidentally took too much off, or the cut that is far from even, or the fact that it still doesn’t latch, and instead reminds himself that the door shuts, now, and he made that happen.
A real man doesn’t watch those TV shows and movies.
By those, of course, he means things like Downton Abbey, which he definitely has not seen every episode of at least four times. Instead, he watches reruns of Sports Night and Friday Night Lights and The X-Files, and he watched every new episode of Mad Men when it aired, and he definitely doesn’t have 82 episodes of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman reruns waiting for him on his DVR right now. And when he watches movies, he sticks to Batman and The X-Men and Saving Private Ryan, and he absolutely does not watch Love Actually every year on Christmas Eve—which is absolutely not his one beloved Christmas tradition—or know a quote from Mean Girls for virtually all contexts, or know all of the major plot points of Runaway Bride, in order, nearly twenty years after it premiered.
And if he does watch these things—if he does, sometimes, after watching football all day Sunday, need to counteract it all with a few episodes of Gilmore Girls before bed—he thinks that he’s the only one, that it’s weird, that he probably shouldn’t admit these things to people—until one day, when he’s on his friends’ porch.
They have just finished drafting their fantasy football teams, and so there they are, six men in their twenties, sitting on the porch, PBR tall boys in their hands, talking about whether it was smarter to draft Dez Bryant or Julio Jones, or Aaron Rodgers or Tom Brady, and then, somehow—he won’t remember later how it happened—one of them says something about When Harry Met Sally.
“Oh, best movie, hands down,” one of his friends says, and he says, “Really?” and his friend says, “What? You don’t think so? Don’t tell me you prefer the Meg Ryan of You’ve Got Mail,” and then his friend proceeds to rank her movies, with Kate and Leopold on the very bottom, You’ve Got Mail beating it out only slightly, City of Angels and Sleepless in Seattle in the middle, and When Harry Met Sally on top. They all argue about this for a while—the exact placement of You’ve Got Mail, and whether or not Kate and Leopold even deserves to be considered, and what about French Kiss?
And during this whole conversation, even when he’s participating, he can’t stop thinking about how strange this all is, how unexpected—six men in their twenties, six guys with beards, most of them wearing flannel in August, debating the hierarchy of Meg Ryan’s 1990s romantic comedy performances, so wholeheartedly embracing this side of themselves. And, for once, he stops worrying about what he’s supposed to do, and he embraces that side of himself, too.
Silas Hansen's essays have appeared in The Normal School, Colorado Review, Slate, Redivider, Hayden's Ferry Review, Best of the Net, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor at Ball State University and the nonfiction editor for Waxwing.