Handy Man

Admitting this is hard.

It goes against everything in my manly, macho nature. Such as it is. I've copped to a love of musical theater so many times on this blog, I'm sure you all at this point can only imagine me in a pretty, pretty party dress as I sit here and type these words. But you're wrong; I'm wearing a tasteful pant suit that I bought at Marshall's during their Spring-tacular Savings Sale and it looks simply divine!!!

Um... It's very slimming. And it's a dramatic navy blue...

Look, the point I'm trying to make is that, despite the fact that the first CD I ever bought was the original cast recording of A Chorus Line (God, how I wish that weren't true), I do have a butch side to my personality and at the moment, that butchness is in serious jeopardy.

See, here's the thing: I'm not handy. Like, at all. I mean, I know what a hammer is and I'm reasonably sure that I know what to do with it (you use it with nails, or something), but beyond that I'm pretty much at a loss. Usually, this isn't something that bothers me; I live in New York, after all, and am rarely called on to help someone, say, build a deck. Unfortunately, things have changed. No, not in the deck-building department, although seriously, I shouldn't talk about deck-building too much or Girlfriend will decide that that's just what we need to liven up our fourth-floor apartment.

And then she'll build one. All by herself.

Because, and this is where the problem lies, Girlfriend is handy. Crazy handy. She's master carpenter Norm Abram, but with long, curly hair and an excellent rack. There is nothing more humiliating, more emasculating, more damaging to the male ego, than having your girlfriend take the screwdriver out of your hand and say, sweetly, so as not to hurt your feelings, "No honey, you're doing that wrong." And that sort of thing happens a lot around our apartment. And the thing that really sucks is, she's right to take tools away from me. Chances are, I'm going to hurt myself with them. Or destroy whatever it is I'm working on. There's even a good chance that I'll use the wrench and the assorted nuts and bolts I've got to accidentally trigger an international incident which will ultimately be the tipping point for World War III; I'm that bad with tools.

Frankly, I don't know how it got this way. I come from a family of extremely handy men. Both my grandfathers are/were quite manly; one owns a ranch and the other, before he died, was a construction foreman for 45 years. All my uncles are Toolbox Heroes, particularly my Uncle Steve, whom I'm fairly certain could tear down a couple of houses, then use the resulting pile of parts to build an entirely new house that was ten times better than the original two houses and also smells wonderfully of cured meats and aftershave. Maybe that's the problem, actually; maybe there was so much manly, tool-savviness in my bloodline that the eventual recessive gene had to be spat out into someone and that someone was me.

Whenever there were home improvement jobs to be done amongst our clan, everyone would gather to help (not like we're Amish or anything; we're just generally a tight family that enjoys hanging out together) and a child would be picked to be the official Helper To The Adults. I was never picked. Ever. That vaunted title always went to my Cousin Jack, who's a year older. Now, granted, Jack earned that title; he is, of course, extremely handy and were I charged with helping the adults, we'd probably be shy a few Uncles by now. Or, at the very least, the Uncles would be shy a few fingers because I wouldn't remember to hand them the saw handle-first. So, because of this, I was always "the reader." The "indoor kid," if you will. While all the men in my family were out repairing garages and building to-scale models of famous whaling ships (I assume that's what they were doing; I don't really know), I was always inside. With the women. Which was where the food was, so that was okay, but still...

Girlfriend, on the other hand, had a father that was a landlord who did all his own repairs. She grew up being taught the mystic ways of the Handyman, and consequently, she's... well, you can read the Norm Abram analogy I made a few paragraphs up again if you haven't caught my drift yet.

Anyway, I bring all of this up because last night Girlfriend and I attempted to hang a new window shade in our living room and it was a bit of an ordeal and after and hour or so of us working on it together, I was asked to please go try to put the new lamp together before one us beats the other to death with a hammer (I'll let you guess which one of us would've been doing the beating). It sucked, not just because it's lame to have your weakness called out, but also because I know she's right to get flustered with me about this sort of thing.

I'm not handy and, therefore, I kinda suck.

I do look damn good in this pant suit, though, and nothing will ever take that away from me.