What is a Man?

At a party recently — gas lamps, meat on a fire, music piped in delicately from a distant computer — I watched a four-year-old boy drop his pants in a corner of the yard and take a leak. No one blinked. Boys do this in the darkling night. The kid seemed to take in the ocean view as he threaded the darkness with his piss. Afterward, pants still clumped in the grass, he glanced over his shoulder, as if looking for help. His mom stood and went inside.

The pulling up of the pants seemed to fall to the father, but he didn't move off his forkful of salad. In just a tick, the mother reemerged, toilet paper in hand. "There's some disagreement on this. She wants him to wipe after he pees," he sighed, shrugging into a what-can-you-do gulp of wine. The men chorused up a protest.

"I know," the dad said. "Right?"

"I've always thought it must be a kind of freedom, that shake thing," one woman said.

"Tap," a man interjected.

"Whatever," she said, looking right at the father. "You have to tell her: Men don't wipe. You have to be sure he has that freedom."

"I've tried," he said. "There's disagreement. She's his mom. She wants him to sit down, too." More moans. Drunken consternation hung strong as the stink of citronella.

That's when a little guy at the end of the table, a motocross enthusiast nursing several new tattoos on his mostly already tattooed legs, nasaled out the following: "I sit down. Always have." This was roundly hooted down, but he stuck by it. "It's quieter that way, too." This from a guy who rides a wound-up motorcycle that's louder than a full-sized industrial band saw.

The woman grinned and looked us over, one by one, man by man: "Standing up to pee," she said. "Without that, what do you guys really have?"

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