12/31/07

Excerpt from Just Add Hormones:

By the time I saw it, it was too late. I was cruising down I-70, hurrying to get back to work from an appointment and thinking about everything but an emergency situation when the metal shot like a bottle rocket from under the tire of the car in front of me and right into my path. My tire deflated instantly, and I steered my hobbling car to the shoulder of the highway. The last time my car had been disabled, several years before, a total of five cars, each with a varying number of men inside, had stopped to help in the twenty minutes before my husband had arrived. That’s it, I thought. All I have to do is get out of the car and wait.

I got out of the car. I waited. The sun was unbearable, and the hot air whipping off the cars passing by me at seventy miles an hour made things even more miserable. Nobody was going to stop. Who would stop to help a man? And wasn’t I a man? This called for some quick thinking—some masculine thinking.

There were things in the trunk, I remembered, that were meant for just such an emergency. I dug them out one by one, consulting my owner’s manual and matching up each piece with the drawing in the manual. When they were all laid out by the roadside, I read the entire manual chapter on changing a tire. Then I proceeded to try to follow the instructions.

I managed to get the jack wedged underneath the frame, and with tortuous grunting and tugging, pushing and pulling, the jack handle repeatedly coming off in my hand, I got the car elevated. I figured out on my own that I could loosen the lug nuts by pounding on the lug nut loosener with my foot. But the lug nut loosener was also the lug nut tightener, and several times I made the frustrating mistake of going in the wrong direction. Lefties, loosies, righties, tighties. It was my mantra until I finally got the tire off. It would have been a whole lot easier if I had loosened the lug nuts before I elevated the car, but that manual was confusing. It didn’t matter. Whatever I was doing was working, albeit extremely slowly.

Sweat bubbled from my scalp and ran down my face and into my eyes. I dabbed at my eyes with a fingertip until I remembered that I had no eye makeup on. Nothing was in danger of smearing. I was still getting used to the fact that I had given up all my female accoutrements. But when I finally realized that there was no mascara to sting my eyes, no carefully applied eyeliner to destroy, I wiped my hand across my face and into my eyes, smearing nothing but the dripping sweat.

I yanked at the tire, working it this way and that until it finally came off, a tangled, mangled, and extremely heavy loop of rubber that was filled with dirt, most of which ended up on me. I heaved it off to the side with a grunt, and this sound, this motion, transformed me. Instantly, both my body and my mind were possessed by some otherworldly masculine force. I had a new manly persona of sweat and filth. The testosterone churned through my veins. At any moment, my muscles might expand to split my shirt in several places, and my glistening, swollen torso would be revealed to every onlooker.

Adopting an apelike swagger, I lumbered back and forth along the side of the road, finally feeling confident that I might actually know what I was doing and that the people passing by might think as much -- “Why, look, Sam. There’s a man who knows what he’s doing.” All I needed was a club and a dinosaur and I could kill dinner. The spare tire was merely an inflatable plastic innertube in my hands. I ignored the fact that it was naturally much smaller and lighter than the original -- it was me, not the tire, that was different.

It was on the car in no time, and I followed my innate masculine intuition, which told me to lower the car before I attempted to tighten the lug nuts. It all came so much more easily now, and when it was finished, I smacked my greasy black palms together, made a long, manly swipe across my forehead with the back of my hand, and stood back to admire my accomplishment. I was soaked, stinking, filthy, and at least thirty minutes had gone by -- but I had changed my tire. It was like some strange rite of passage, and I felt proud.

When I arrived at work, I casually relayed my experience as if such things happened every day, making sure that everyone within earshot knew that I had been in full control at all times. But the novelty soon wore off. When the women at work heard of my feat, I was called on regularly to change the flat tires that sometimes happened in the parking lot. It was also assumed that I knew why cars wouldn’t start, and that I would be able to fix them. It turned out that jumper cables were as much an accessory of manhood as my dangling earrings had been of womanhood. And I somehow gained the status of carnival strong man, being summoned to move heavy objects -- file cabinets and tables in the meeting rooms -- although my arm muscles were particularly pathetic. Suddenly I was expected to reach things in high places, although I hadn’t grown an inch. I was expected, in other words, to be a man.

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