For a much worse offense than telling a lame joke
by Stacey Warde
Toxic masculinity (circa 1975)
At 15, I took a round slap to the face from a young woman about my age. Not for making a lame joke but for something much worse, for an assault.
I was in the midst of drying off after taking a short ocean swim break from my duties as a store clerk at Clark’s Surf Shop on 15th Street in Newport Beach, Calif., then a popular summer hangout for teens. We rented rafts and umbrellas, and sold mens and womens swimwear, towels and lotions, whatever anyone needed to stay comfortable on the beach.
My work mate, an accomplished popular surfer named Jack, who was a few years older than I, laughed uproariously as the smack of the woman’s hand against my face reverberated throughout the shop.
“What did you do?” he asked, still laughing as the girl strode proudly back out onto the crowded, sun-drenched boardwalk that ran up and down the Newport Beach Peninsula, busy with cyclists on beach cruisers, skaters on skateboards and roller skates, and sunbathers strolling, looking for a hookup or a hamburger.
“I smacked her on the butt,” I said. He laughed even more loudly.
“You did what? Do you even know her?”
No, I told Jack, who was teaching me how to bodysurf the monster south swells that pummeled Orange County’s south-facing beaches during the late summer, swells kicked up by Baja’s hurricane season. I respected him and felt the rightness of the humiliation I suffered in that moment as he sought to understand what had just happened.
I thought I was hot stuff, running out to the ocean’s edge with my swim fins, fearless in the face of some really big waves that Jack taught me how to bodysurf, eager to show off what I’d learned from him. He was the real water ballet dancer, spinning down the face of some of the biggest waves I’d ever seen, holding himself steady halfway down and hydroplaning on his hands inside the wave, the wave’s lip threatening to bury him beneath a ton of water, then spinning himself several times more before torpedoing himself out the back side to meet the next big wave. He was fearless and artful and at-ease in the water, and I really admired those qualities.
***
It had taken me a long time to get comfortable with swimming because, as a young boy, I was terrified of the water after someone, a male in the family, decided to teach me how to swim by throwing me into the deep end for a “sink or swim” swimming lesson, which I failed. I struggled and began sinking until someone fished me out. I refused from that point on never to go near the water.
Until then, as a 5-year-old, I had been perfectly content to hang out in the shallow end of the pool, clinging for dear life to the pool’s edge. But for some reason, not from malice so much as from the notion that a boy shouldn’t be a pansy hanging onto the edge of the pool, never venturing beyond his limits, one of the menfolk in my family decided to test my mettle by lifting me out of the shallow water and hurling me into the deep end. I remember it being one of my uncles; mom says it was my biological father who had abandoned us one year earlier. In either case, someone had decided it was time for me to stop being a “pussy.”
Mom had to hire someone, a young woman, to lure me back into the pool after nearly one year of my refusal to get wet, she says. It wasn’t easy; it took some work, patience on the part of my instructor. I don’t remember exactly when I began to really love the water but eventually I overcame my fear of swimming and became a proficient swimmer–and learned to be wary around the menfolk in my family.
***
I trusted Jack, and the girls on the beach seemed to like him as well. He was not a macho kind of guy, even with his hairy chest. He had a slight build, high-pitched voice, and was not “manly” in the typical sense but more like the dolphins we’d see swimming in the warmer south-swell waters, gleaming, playful, and proficient. He was graceful, good-natured, and good-humored.
Whenever possible, friends and I would watch him swim each time he ventured out into the ocean and we would marvel over his mastery of these enormous waves and over his ease of movement in the rush of water pounding the beaches. He usually was the only swimmer to brave those waves, and the lifeguards knew him well enough to leave him alone while they chased everyone else safely away from the water’s edge.
I explained to him how I’d noticed this girl on the beach; she was a regular, and I found her attractive. As I was running up the boardwalk, out to the water for my midmorning swim, I saw her coming toward me, and so took the liberty of slapping her bikini butt as I trotted past her.
“What?” Jack gasped.
She’d waited, apparently, watching me as I took my swim, and followed me back into the shop to correct the situation. She walked to where I was drying off in the store, stood herself directly in front of me, took a deep breath, looked me square in the eye, and with a heave of her arm, slapped me hard. Really hard on the face, not just with fingers but palm and the heavy swing of her outstretched arm. It hurt and it stung. Then, to the music of Jack’s laughter, she marched out.
“You better go find her and apologize,” he said.
I gave him a look, as if to ask if he could manage the shop without me because it was getting close to lunch time, the busiest part of our day, and also because I didn’t really want to apologize. I was afraid to apologize, to admit that I’d done something wrong. Yet I knew that I’d made a poor choice, and hurt someone, and Jack knew it too. I could feel the pain, not just on my reddened, hard-slapped face, but more deeply. Jack shooed me away. Go! Take care of business, he seemed to be saying. I put on my shirt and took off for the beach.
I was half-hoping that I wouldn’t find her. Yet, one way or another, I would need to make things right, admit that I was wrong for slapping that girl’s butt, that I had taken liberty where none was offered. I would, as was so common during summers at the beach, inevitably run into her again. What would I say? How would I face her? I could feel the shame building up inside of me.
Plus, if Mrs. Clark, the nicest lady in the whole world and owner of the shop, caught wind of what had happened, I’d feel more awful than I already did. If word got out that one of her boys working the surf shop was assaulting potential customers, she would have been hurt too. She trusted us enough to leave the shop in our hands and let us run the place. Knowing also our love for the ocean, she was ok with us taking turns on big south swell days to test ourselves in the water. I knew I had a good thing, this summer job on the beach.
I found the girl, sitting among friends on towels in the sand, lounging, enjoying the sun and breeze, not far from the public restrooms where so many of the usual crowd would hang out at “The Wall,” a brick and mortar construction, to watch the surf and gaze at beachcombers as they trudged through the sand to find their places. It was a glorious summer day, the waves roaring up the wet sand, electricity in the air as the south swells pounded the beach.
I braced myself, wary of alarming her and her friends, eager to make things right, to make peace. One of her friends turned to see me coming and warned the others. They all turned to look as I approached, making sure, I guessed, that I would not commit another assault.
“I came to apologize,” I said nervously, hoping to set their minds at ease, dropping to my knees in the sand to avoid towering over them where they sat on their towels. “I’m really sorry,” I said to the girl.
“You had no right to do that!” she said. “You don’t even know me!”
“Yes, I know. I’m really sorry. I won’t ever do it again.”
Her demeanor softened and we chatted briefly about how much we enjoyed the ocean and how that was the most important thing, our only real common interest. Beyond that, we would not be friends, merely acquaintances. Periodically, we would see each other and wave, or say hello.
My struggles with women did not end there.
I’ve offered apologies for worse behavior than slapping a girl on the butt. As a man, I’ve succumbed to the same toxic maleness that possessed whoever threw me into the pool to teach me a lesson about swimming when I didn’t know how to swim. And once, when I called someone “a pussy,” a woman, a friend and lover, laughed at me and said: “Pussy? Try pushing a baby through your penis and see what happens!”
***
The men in my family, mostly uncles, wanted what was best for me, and they taught me what they thought I needed to know to thrive in the world as it was then (and perhaps still is) configured: Men had to be tough, not whiners or “little pussies,” but ready to fight for what was right, and grab what’s theirs before someone took it away. There was no time to cry, or “be like a girl.”
I ventured out into the deep end, however, not because I “manned up” when thrown into it, but because a woman was kind and patient enough to coax me back, not to go deep right away, but simply to get into the water again–after experiencing the terror of drowning–and actually becoming unafraid of and passionate about swimming.
I’m still learning how to swim. The deep end is indeed a scary place.
Stacey Warde is a writer living in Mendocino County, not far from the ocean.
