Why Men Are Afraid of Women

Sometimes the Wrong Thing Is the Right Thing

Sometimes the Wrong Thing Is the Right Thing T he other six nights at the Joker belong to the semiprofessional eighteen-year-olds with too much breast, too little hip, and all the assurance in the world, flashy girls with hard little asses no bigger than volleyballs, who strut their stuff, roll their eyes at the men, and end up being about as sexy as Shirley Temple. But on Saturday, starting at seven and going on as long as the supply of volunteers holds out, it's these other women. They are generally older, in their late twenties or even thirties, and they have real bodies. Bodies that have seen more of life than the local motel or the back seats of cars, or the little room at home with the teddy bears on the wallpaper. When they come on stage and begin to sway to the music of the Troubadours, to unzip and unsnap and unbutton, things change. Watch the men who watch these older women and you can see that the fantasies are different. Darker. Serious ideas are being worked out under the Resistol hats then. Listen to the big men breathe, look at the eyes. All the lightheartedness that comes with the eighteen-year-olds is gone now. "What are we doing here, Linda-Sue?" Charlie asks me. It's Saturday, amateur night, and fifteen or twenty Sometimes the Wrong Thing Is the Right Thing 139 women are waiting backstage for their turn to step out under the purple spotlights and take their clothes off while Floyd Thatcher and his boys play good serious country music. One of the fifteen or twenty is my sister Stella, Charlie's wife. "We're here to carry on with your sentimental education ," I tell Charlie. He stubs out his seventeenth Marlboro Light and looks at me patiently. Stella has taught him patience. Before he married her he didn't know much about life, but he could look you in the eye clear and certain. Now more and more every day he has a funny expression, as if one of his friends at Al's Body Shop had tapped him behind the ear with the big rubber-headed hammer they use to pound out dents. Dazed, I mean, though I am sorry to say I see hope there too. "What's that supposed to mean?" Charlie says. "Sentimental education?" "Oh, Charlie, haven't you ever read a book?" "I read one every week," he says. He does, but they are serious books, not fiction, which he calls lies. He taps a Marlboro out of the pack and hands it across the table. I take it because I know Ijust made him feel bad. Lots of people walk through life wearing a sign that says Kick Me, but that doesn't mean you have to. Charlie wants desperately to be a good person, and my sister Stella is helping him as hard as she can. She seems to believe being hurt is the best way to learn to be good. I am nervous and as far as I can tell by looking across the table at him Charlie is dazed, puzzled, hopeful . Maybe more than a little sad too. I think he suspects that he and Stella are coming to the end of the road, and there is not much in his life to replace being married, unless you count playing stud poker Friday 140 Why Men Are Afraid of Women nights with his buddies from the body shop, and once a year taking a week off to go fly-fishing by himself on a little river in Idaho. "After all, she's my sister," I say, as much to myself as to Charlie. "My own flesh and blood." "Don't worry. She'll be the best," he says. "And it doesn't make you feel peculiar at all?" "Why would it?" he says. It is in Stella's mind that Charlie will learn something by watching his wife prance naked in front of strangers . Actually not strangers—I could look around this crowded, smoky room and name half the people. Better if it was strangers, instead of Perry Hoffer and the Thibodeaux brothers and half a dozen more who will spread the story all over town by tomorrow. Maybe he will learn something by it—Charlie is no dummy—but I don't think that what he learns will...