You're Married to Her?

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“
You're Married to HER?
is a hilariously brazen memoir. Ira Wood lets his delirious inner Portnoy off its leash, no holds barred, and what a romp! It's really fun, laugh-out-loud, and I couldn't put it down. It's f**king delightful.”

—
John Nichols
, Author of
The Milagro Beanfield War

 

“This is not just a funny book: it's a darkly funny, wildly confessional, beautifully constructed description of an ordinary guy written as if it were a collaboration between Jean Jacques Rousseau, Robin Williams, and Woody Allen.”

—
Mary Mackey
, Author of
The Widow's War

 

“Ira Wood is the funniest essayist I've read since Woody Allen. This is more than wit; this is hard-earned wisdom, a memoir of rare intelligence, honesty and integrity. “

—
Martín Espada
, author of
The Trouble Ball
and
The Republic of Poetry

 

“Damned funny stories.'”

—
Pagan Kennedy
, Author of
The First Man-made Man
and
Black Livingstone

(with Marge Piercy)

(with Marge Piercy)

“I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That's how come I write so good.”

—Kurt Vonnegut,
Timequake

O
ne summer morning when I was seven years old, sitting next to my father in the front seat of his Ford Fairlane, I was presented with a question that would remain with me for fifty years. My father was a headstrong and self-destructive man. He held grudges so long he often forgot what had made him angry in the first place. He ate with gluttonous disregard for his appearance and his health, was disdainful of exercise, chain-smoked after each of his three heart attacks and died in his sleep at 62 years old as a result of the fourth.

In contrast to his reckless personal habits, he was the most cautious driver I have ever known and insisted on a literal interpretation of the term “speed limit.” That is, unlike most drivers who regard the posted speed as a rough suggestion, my father saw it as the absolute extremity of rational conduct—like jumping from the window of a tall building at the first whiff of smoke—to be used only in the event of emergency.

My father drove so slowly it was hard to tell if the window was open. It was a common occurrence for him to lead a three-mile entourage of enraged commuters, his speedometer needle hovering at twenty in a forty-five mile per hour zone. Hardly oblivious to the furious parade behind him, the middle fingers jabbing out windows, the flashing high beams, the exasperated drivers bug-eyed with road rage spitting curses and pounding their horns, my father would initiate conversations with them in the rear view mirror. “Got an important meeting, Mr. Big Man?” he'd taunt them, or “Your time is s-o-o-o much more important than mine?” reproaching their audacious need to make the train on time or get to the hospital before the baby was born, always with the assumption that they thought themselves superior. As soon as we reached a broken yellow line and could be legally passed I would squeeze my eyes shut and hold my palms over my ears in an effort to block out the gestures and epithets from the drivers speeding by, because I knew we deserved them.

On this particular day, however, one car did not barrel past but came abreast of us on the left and slowed to my father's speed. Through his open window the driver looked hard at my father and roared, not a curse, but a question. “How'd you get that way, you little
putz
? That's what I want to know.”

A
putz
, in Yiddish, is a fool, an idiot, but literally, a penis. Having been raised with my father's stories of growing up in grinding poverty (false, according to
my uncle: their father was a licensed plumber and had work all through the Great Depression) and being sent to school without shoes (preposterous, according to his sister), I had a child's notion that my father was a strange and self-pitying man but not what it had to do with a penis.

Five decades later the answer found expression in a completely unrelated phrase, a naughty maxim from First Amendment law. Now the publisher of a small literary press, I was researching defamation of character in conjunction with a memoir we were publishing when I came upon “the small penis rule,” a droll but practical safeguard against charges of libel.

According to the
New York Times,
Libel lawyers have what is known as “the small penis rule.” “One way authors can protect themselves from libel suits is to say that a character has a small penis,” Attorney Leon Friedman said. “Now no male is going to come forward and say, ‘That character with a very small penis, that's me!'”

My father had nothing to do with law or libel but at the focal point of his mental picture of himself he was a naked man in a crowd of strangers, an object of ridicule and a failure. Painfully ambitious and hard working, a patternmaker by trade, a partner in a procession of hapless dress manufacturing firms in Manhattan's Garment District, popular with other men and, in spite of a serious case of acne in his adolescence that marked his face all through his life, considered ruggedly handsome, he was nonetheless handicapped by a loathsome self image
and given to viewing himself through a distorted mirror, one in which he saw all his flaws and none of his strengths. Whenever his behavior reflected this distorted image of himself he did indeed act like a fool, a
putz
—and long after his death I admit, so have I. In fact, writing a book of stories mined however loosely from memory has caused me to wince on almost every page, to admit, That character with a very small penis, that
is
me. For the record, and those readers oblivious to metaphor, I would have avoided the subject entirely if my wife did not assure me I was of average size, an opinion as comforting as it is troublesome because I know how much research she's done first hand.

My wife is a prolific writer, hardly famous—fame being far too ephemeral an assertion for any serious writer who does not spend an enormous amount of energy in its cultivation—but admired by many for speaking truth to power. Considered too political, too feminist, and admittedly too unsentimental and class-conscious in her sensibilities to stay on any best seller list for long, she is, as even her critics would have to admit, an iconic American novelist and poet whose work appears widely in text books, rituals, anthologies, lit mags, newsletters, testimonials, dedications, and (almost the instant her poems appear in print, it seems) on the internet. For many years after we started living together we were something of a curiosity. There was not only a disparity in reputation (I had none) but in age, almost fourteen years (as it turns out, it is a habit of women in her family
to marry younger men). There were many more reversals (maturity, education, sexual experience, success at earning a living) that, while commonplace between a man and a much younger woman, unsettled enough people for them to ask me to my face,

You're
married to her? (Why you?)

You're married to
her
? (The writer?)

You're
married
to her? (Why would she want to do that?)

The answer has been yes for over thirty years now, but for the first fifteen of them, I admit, it was a question I sometimes asked myself. Why in the world would a woman writer at the peak of her career put up with behavior that was rational only to an albeit sweet-enough guy who was unsophisticated and self-defeating? This book roughly covers that time. Readers seeking insight into the creativity of a prolific American artist had best look at my wife's own memoir, for these are my stories, those of the very lucky young man she chose not merely to put up with but to love, and for slim rewards except being fiercely loved in return. They're the stories of a guy without a goal who took every half-assed, oddball, shortcut to get there; a guy whose guiding principle was the small penis rule, which we all follow at times, men
and
women, when our behavior sinks to the level of our self-esteem.

W
hen I was sixteen years old I fell in love with a mysterious yellow-haired girl from a prominent and affluent family. Knowing she was a year older than me and there was nothing that would remotely excite her to return my feelings, I told her that my parents were dead.

It was never easy for me to be alone with girls and with a girl like Allison it was impossible. We didn't use words like “aloof” in high school or “patronizing” to describe a girl who never laughed at boys who made farting sounds in their armpits but observed them with the detached curiosity due insect specimens, as if wondering how long it might take them to suffocate in a vacuum jar.

None of my friends liked Allison. The girls were jealous of her clothes. The boys said her ass was too big. In fact she did have more of a woman's body than a girl's. I loved the slow easy sway of her buttocks when she walked and the extra little twitch she gave when
she knew some idiot was watching. I loved the way she crossed her legs at the knee in history and dangled a shoe from one toe, just biding time, as if all of high school was a stoplight you had to endure until it turned green. People repeated all kinds of rumors about Allison. That she did it with older guys. That her mother drank. But since no one had ever hung out with Allison or had even been inside her house I imagined I recognized something of myself in this strangely grown up girl: a weariness of things adolescent, a desire to stay beneath the radar of the residing morons, and above all a longing to pass through to the other side—to college.

At the end of junior year we both had roles in
The Music Man
. She was a Pick-A-Little Lady, a small singing part. I was the oafish Mayor Shinn, the second male lead. Because I had accidentally split the seam of my pants on the night of dress rehearsal I received an unexpected round of applause. When the curtain fell Allison absently squeezed my shoulder. “You were so funny!” she said, and from that one spontaneous gesture I had all the encouragement I needed. Summoning the power of positive thinking from a technique I had read about in
Readers Digest
called Sylva Mind Control, I offered to walk her home along the beach. Caught without an excuse, she accepted.