real guys don't cry

Larry McMurtry, in the preface to an early novel, writes this: "The knottiest aesthetic problem I fumbled with in Moving On is whether its heroine, Patsy Carpenter, cries too much." Do your characters cry? In public or private? Frequently? Never? If they don’t cry, what would make them cry? Know your characters! Let me tell you about Richie.

It’s Saturday and my friend Richie from up the street has dropped in to watch the game with me. As usual he’s brought a small cooler with bottles of Bud for him and Corona for me. I slide a frozen pepperoni pizza into the oven and cut up a lime for the Coronas.

Richie claims the recliner while I’m in the kitchen, so I settle in on the sofa. Richie tosses me a Corona and says "Think fast." I fumble but finally catch the bottle with two hands. Richie gives the out sign, like an umpire. "Almost an error there, Dave," he says. Then he pitches the bottle opener to me, the one he’s had since college, the much-travelled one with the well endowed metallic babe for a handle. I open the Corona and squeeze a lime wedge into the neck while Richie snickers and takes a big gulp from his Bud. He always snickers, but it’s never stopped me from adding the lime.

It’s my place so I control the remote. The game’s not on yet and I’m flipping fast and then there are cowboys on the screen so Richie says "whoa" and these two cowboys ride toward each other, and they hug and kiss, except that one is a cowgirl so it’s not Brokeback Mountain and Richie can relax. Then we hear a woman’s emotional voiceover saying, "The moment his lips touched mine I knew that we would never again be apart."

Richie calls out "Chick flick! Change it!" but I don’t, not yet. Then we see Kathleen Turner typing and crying, and she’s saying, "I knew then that we would spend the rest of our life together forever. Forever." And Kathleen Turner’s crying her eyes out and Richie’s groaning and covering his eyes and pleading "No more, no more, no more," and Turner says, through the tears, "Oh God, that’s good," and she types "THE END" and Richie is reaching over to grab the remote away from me but I stick it down my jeans and I know he’s not going in there.

Richie retreats to the recliner, folds his arms, and stares at me as if I’ve lost my mind. "Chick flick, man," he says, "chick flick," I tell him not really, that there’s lots of action and bad guys and jungle scenes, just wait for it. He asks me what’s the name of the movie and I tell him Romancing the Stone, and he says that proves it, right there in the first word. If it were Throwing the Stone, or Playing Football With the Stone, or Die Hard With the Stone, I think he’d give it a chance.

"Oh my God," Richie says, "she’s celebrating with her cat now!" It’s true, Kathleen Turner is opening a can of tuna for the cat and lighting candles to celebrate finishing the novel. "Make her stop crying," Richie says. "Please. Or just change the channel. Let’s watch Sportscenter."

"Is it the crying?" I say. "You don’t like watching women cry?"

"Well jeez, it’s never good when they cry. You know that. It means we’re going to end up losing."


"Okay," I say, "but what if the woman’s crying with joy because you’ve just given her incredible physical pleasure?"

Richie stops and thinks. He’s replaying the greatest hits from his love life. "Nope," he finally says, "never happened to me."

"Me neither." We’re so honest with each other. "Say, Richie, have you ever cried?"

"Nah, real guys don’t cry. Except maybe that one time I was a kid and I broke my arm and it hurt like hell. Have you?"

"A few times, I guess. My high school sweetheart ran off with a sailor. I told you about that one."


"Yeah," Richie says, "that’s why you always root for Army to crush Navy. Come on now, enough’s enough. Turn on ESPN."

I punch in the numbers and Kathleen Turner disappears and the Sportscenter guys come on. They’re dressed up in suits and ties, but I wish they’d just wear regular guy clothes like Richie and me and not sit behind a desk.

"You know what I hate?" Richie says. It’s a long list, the things Richie hates, longer than my list, although there are things that are on both our lists. "I hate it when some great ballplayer hangs ‘em up and rides into the sunset, but first he has to have the stupid press conference to announce his retirement and he starts bawling like a baby. Real guys don’t cry."

"I hate that too," I chime in. "Tom Hanks was right. There’s no crying in baseball."

"Yeah," Richie says, "if it was me, I’d just open a cold Bud and wave goodbye and say it’s been fun but I’m outta here and I’ll see you in Cooperstown." Richie in the Hall of Fame? That’s what you call your hypothetical right there.

Just then the front door opens and it’s my wife, Nikki, back from her workout at the gym. Richie grabs a Bud out of the cooler and shakes it up real good, then tosses it to her, along with the bottle opener, and says "Think fast," and she catches the bottle with one hand and the opener with the other. She played a mean shortstop in college. Then Nikki stands over Richie, who is fully reclined and fully vulnerable, and holds the Bud bottle kind of horizontal and tells him "Think fast" and opens it and watches it spurt onto Richie’s Bud belly, soaking his shirt, and Richie doesn’t get upset, he just laughs like it’s the funniest thing that ever happened and he looks at me as if to tell me, once again, that I married the coolest woman in the world.

Richie told me once that it’s great she works out "like us." I’m not sure what he was referring to by "like us," unless he meant the times we take a football out to the back yard and try to throw it and catch it without spilling our beers. Or maybe the whiffleball games in the back yard, which works out better because it’s easier to catch without spilling the suds, and you can swing a whiffle bat with one hand no problem.

Nikki plops down next to me on the couch and says, "Hey Dave, look, there’s your hero on Sportscenter, Peyton Manning."

"Best quarterback in the world," I say, and Richie starts in on his same old "Joe Montana, in his prime, best quarterback in the universe," and we turn to Nikki to settle the argument, and I know she’s always saying that Tom Brady is way cuter than Peyton, but she’s also loyal to me, so I wait for her to jump on the Peyton train, but instead she rolls her eyes and says, "You guys are pathetic. Best quarterback ever? No contest. It’s John Elway."

Then suddenly Nikki says, "Hush, it’s My Wish on Sportscenter." She grabs the remote so we can’t change it. My Wish is a long feature where they find this sick kid and tell their sad story and then they let them meet their sports hero and everybody feels warm and fuzzy. Don’t get me wrong, ESPN does it well, and you can’t say anything bad about being nice to sick kids, but Richie and I would rather be watching a game.

This week the My Wish folks at ESPN are telling the story of Dani, a 10-year-old girl who almost died from a brain tumor and now is having a little trouble walking. They show Dani watching a Michelle Kwan skating video at home when the phone rings and it’s Michelle and she talks with Dani, and Dani’s face, which was so damn cute already, just lights up. Then Dani and her family ride in a limo to meet Michelle at the rink, and Michelle hugs her and gives her the actual jacket that she wore in the 2002 Winter Olympics. Then she takes Dani on the ice for a skating lesson, and it’s the sweetest thing you ever saw.

I hear these muffled sounds and look over at Richie, who has a daughter the same age as Dani, and Richie is rubbing his eyes and trying to hide the fact that he’s shedding big tears. I nudge Nikki, who’s wiping away some tears of her own, and we both stare at Richie, who doesn’t dare look at us.

On the screen Michelle Kwan makes hot chocolate for Dani and gives her a big candy bar and talks to her softly, and then I can’t hold it any longer. Nikki smiles at me and touches the tears on my cheek. Then Richie surrenders and starts bawling. Nikki goes over and puts a hand on his shoulder to comfort him. "It’s okay," Nikki tells him. "Sometimes real guys cry too."

Richie jumps up and stumbles into the kitchen. "I’ll check on the pizza," he says. When he comes back his eyes are red and he has slices for all of us. Between the beer Nikki poured on him and the flood of tears he’s been unable to dam up, he’s a wet and sorry sight. I’ll take him for a friend though, even if he doesn’t appreciate Peyton.