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The Man Show
By ALLISON GLOCK
Charlie LeDuff wants you to know he is a real man. He brawls. He mouths off. He drinks. He uses drugs. He watches porn. He doesn’t understand women and he doesn’t care to waste time trying. Instead, he aches to be Hunter S. Thompson, or maybe Johnny Depp, an ambition palpable in his latest book, “US Guys,” a collection of antagonistic essays ostensibly about the looming implosion of the common man.
Derived from material LeDuff, a national correspondent for The New York Times, gathered while filming “Only in America,” a Discovery Times television show about life in this fine but complicated country of ours, “US Guys” is the follow-up to his first book, “Work and Other Sins,” a similar collection that profiled firefighters, inmates and gamblers among others, using what LeDuff tellingly labels “hanging-out journalism.” In “US Guys,” LeDuff endeavors to pull the curtain back on the dark interior of “average” men’s souls. He does this primarily by engaging in curious, extreme activities like bull riding in a gay rodeo, joining a C-level professional football team and cavorting with snake handlers, bike gang toughs and male models. Not exactly average. But, one imagines, diverting television.
His adventures are basically exercises in confrontational masculinity, with most of the bullying supplied by LeDuff. In one chapter he prods his subject to violence (“I would have hit him in the mouth”); in another, he invites a man to expose his innate racism (“You can do it. Ni ... ni ... ni ...”). He is like Borat without the laughs.
He describes himself as a “town crier,” the self-appointed voice for those forgotten ordinary folks who have lost the inclination to speak on their own behalf. Aimless, beleaguered men who apparently feel little joy or transcendence, unless they are huffing paint cans or getting pummeled in the face.
“The men of my generation are angry, howling, nasty, searching,” LeDuff writes. “A scratchy feeling that they’re getting short-changed, screwed. One scheme after another falls apart. Then a man has no impulse control. The slightest whiff of disrespect is an irritation likely to end in physical harm.”
“US Guys” focuses on sex and rage and all the other adrenal, festering parts LeDuff feels are swallowing his gender. “Men crave dignity and fulfillment, and when they cannot attain those, they become unhappy, quarrelsome, small-minded, blowhards, overintellectuals, chauvinists, cowards, dopers, abstainers, aesthetes, racists, talk show know-it-alls and critics,” he writes with authority, conviction. LeDuff takes pains to point out that these are stories about struggling men, not “rich people,” and in doing so exudes the condescension unique to working-class blokes who have left behind their fried-bologna rearing for realms they previously mocked and mistrusted. Once a cannery hand, LeDuff may be a writer now, but he is still one of the guys. And he tries to prove this point on every page.
In the chapter about gay rodeo, when a local paper assumes LeDuff is homosexual, he writes, “If the editors needed any proof of my sexual orientation, they could have easily sent me their unhappy wives and girlfriends and I would return them home with a smile.” In the section in which LeDuff joins an Arena 2 football team, he tells us that pregame, he relieved himself and didn’t wash afterward “in case I needed to poke someone in the eye.” George Plimpton, meet your successor. Just don’t shake his hand.
egomaniac Charlie LeDuff LeDuff banks on velocity. He writes in a feverish spew, a collision of adjectives and anger spat out like bullets. And this stylistic miasma works, especially when the object of his study (stoned revelers, evangelists) marries the visceral tone. He is strongest describing place — an old motor lodge rests in “a highly unrecommended corner of Tulsa,” a Detroit house is “the sort of box that if you tripped coming in the front door, you found yourself falling out the back.” These are quiet, perceptive gems, too often buried in the wake of LeDuff’s need to rooster around, to make himself the hero of every fable.
In a section on Detroit homicide detectives, LeDuff is the one who detains a suspected serial killer while the cops are distracted. In another chapter, at the conclusion of an otherwise deliciously squalid account of the self-righteous hippie tripfest known as Burning Man, LeDuff actually assumes the role of God, a choice both perplexing and redundant.
LeDuff wants these invisible men to be seen, so long as they don’t eclipse him. As both narrator and subject he is chippy and hostile. Needy and belligerent. At home in obscenity. An erection in print. Fair enough — if this were a memoir. (“Let Us Now Praise Famous Me!”)
But “US Guys” is meant to be an examination of the mind of American men. And if that is the case, these points have been made before (by Studs Terkel, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Ralph Ellison, Barbara Ehrenreich and Upton Sinclair among many others), better and with less attention to the writer’s bowels.
In the end, we only learn a whole lot about the true and twisted mind of one American man. Who happens to believe he’s Everyman. And if that’s the case, then LeDuff help us.
US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man
by Charlie LeDuff
Penguin Press: 242 pp., $25.95
Charlie LeDuff likes characters, and the more blue-collar, the better; no fancy folk for him. His first book, "Work and Other Sins," a collection of sketches culled from pieces he wrote for the New York Times (where he is a reporter), showcased a parade of New York doormen, gamblers, car salesmen, bigmouths and daydreamers.
Clearly influenced by the late New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, LeDuff went heavy on old-time Big Apple flavor. Here's a taste: "Pete Sanseli is an East Side barber, the coiffeur to titans of industry, lawyers, poets, playwrights and some minor journalists. He has good hands constructed of long, fine bones, and when they are at work, his scissors make a 'tick-a-tack' sound of a teletype machine." This is charming in small doses but curdles at book length.
Similar problems of style mar his new book, "US Guys," an amped-up look at what he calls "the true and twisted mind of the American man." This time around, extending his range to testosterone-fueled antics around the country, LeDuff channels Tom Wolfe and George Plimpton to varying effect. Like the work of Wolfe and Plimpton, these stories are as much about LeDuff as they are about his subjects. And his staccato riffs on the nation's current predicament get really annoying: "The country's adrift. Uneasy. Broke. Making less."
In "US Guys," LeDuff zigs and zags across the Lower 48, from Oklahoma to Montana, from Oregon to Florida, on the trail of American manhood — and himself. He finds a lot of angst out there, anxiety about immigration, the economy, about having a purpose in life. "[L]ooking back," he writes, "this was a search for the angry, forgotten middling America from where I come." LeDuff is angry all right — he'd just as soon flip you the bird as shake your hand. (If we ever meet, I half expect him to deck me.) He may have a slender frame, as he'll remind you, but LeDuff sports a heavyweight attitude. He has something to prove, though I'm not exactly sure what.
A practitioner of what you might call knucklehead journalism, LeDuff likes to be in the mix and to mix it up. A journey to Oakland takes him to the East Bay Rats bikers club, whose members "like to drink, blow things up and throw parties where the central amusement is fighting." LeDuff makes himself right at home among the rabble. A band apart, the Rats are "perhaps the most complete-incomplete men there are": Knocking each other's blocks off provides an existential oomph. He challenges the biggest dude of the bunch ("Big Mike, the barefoot behemoth, the ultimate man whom nobody wanted to try") to a fight — and loses, of course. But losing is beside the point. For him, it's all about staying "strong despite the weaknesses." This is the ultimate validation, a sign of authenticity.
LeDuff is fascinated by the beaten-down and the second-rate. In Amarillo, Texas, he joins a semiprofessional football team — the Dusters — stocked with also-rans, "dudes grasping at the frayed end of a rope of hope, a single step from obsolescence." This is no insult; these men have their dream and are living it, no matter how far from the NFL they are. Ever the gamer (à la Plimpton in "Paper Lion"), he gets himself on the team but not just to play. The team, made up of white, Latino and black athletes, becomes a laboratory of sorts as LeDuff stirs "the racial witch's brew." Slurs fly and the author hopes to learn something about race in America. It's a somewhat uneasy process — there are tensions between white and black players — but LeDuff manages to get two of the antagonists to shake hands.
I'm not sure we learn much from this encounter; LeDuff is a hit-or-miss sociologist. Still, he's adventurous and wants to go beyond conventional ideas of masculinity. One excursion takes him to Oklahoma City and a gay rodeo championship. LeDuff being LeDuff, he takes part in a bull-riding event dressed in full drag, although he's anxious to tell us he's "straight as an arrow." He pals around with Baby Boy Miller, "the gay buckaroo," and underscores the point that, yes, America, there are gay people in the heartland.
LeDuff fancies himself a tolerant, accepting fellow, but his equanimity has its limits; he can fly off the handle and it's fun to watch. Venturing into "the sandbox of counterculture" (not exclusively a male preserve), he checks out the Burning Man festival in Nevada. He's appalled by the posturing, the consumerism masquerading as faux enlightenment: "Destruction as an artistic movement; let us call it Nouveau Nihilism." He's not buying it. His scorn is withering: "[F]orty thousand freaks scream without moving their mouths. Forty thousand stray dogs pissing all over the place." He finds not an ounce of authenticity.
But LeDuff finds the heart of fakeness back in his old stamping ground, New York, "capital of glam and soft-work-for-a-living." He goes there to investigate male beauty and is even more appalled. Attempting to become a male model, he stops by the now-defunct Cargo magazine, a kind of cut-rate GQ. The fashion industry is trying to make men soft, LeDuff observes: "They are creating a whole subgenus. The alpha-pansy." It's pretty amusing watching him go through the motions: He gets a facial, a manicure, a haircut, tries to find in himself "the girlish alter ego that lurks underneath the mustache of every man." Needless to say, he doesn't. All this stuff is ruining New York, he gripes. The city has become "self-satisfied, self-centered and self-important."
LeDuff is unsparing, if hilarious. Still, the fashion world is an easy target. He's better off looking elsewhere for us guys.
Matthew Price is a journalist and critic in New York.
Charlie LeDuff
Writer, Author Charlie LeDuff Quits N.Y. Times
Charlie LeDuff, a New York Times reporter who often writes, in the words of reviewer Todd Gitlin, "about folks who claw and hang on by their fingernails," has quit the newspaper, telling Journal-isms, "my time is better spent with my daughter." |
| Charlie LeDuff |
LeDuff said he made an appointment to see Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and told him of his decision a couple of days ago, and that Sulzberger, whose vision LeDuff said he admires, said he was sorry to see LeDuff go.
"I can't write the things I want to say," LeDuff said, venting frustration with his editors. "I want to talk about race, I want to talk about class. I want to talk about the things we should be talking about," he said.
From August to November, LeDuff, 40, wrote an eight-part series, "American Album," whose topics included "a Latina from the rough side of Dallas" who "works the lobster shift at a Burger King," a Minuteman and an Alaska national guardsman believed to be the first Inuit, or Eskimo, killed because of the Iraq war.
Based in Los Angeles, LeDuff covered the 2005 trials of Robert Blake, the actor acquitted of charges that he murdered his wife; and Michael Jackson, the "king of pop" who had been accused of molesting a 13-year-old cancer patient.
In the Times' prize-winning 2000 series, "How Race is Lived in America," LeDuff wrote about a Tar Heel, N.C., hog slaughterhouse, where "The few whites on the payroll tend to be mechanics or supervisors. As for the Indians, a handful are supervisors; others tend to get clean menial jobs like warehouse work. With few exceptions, that leaves the blacks and Mexicans with the dirty jobs at the factory, one of the only places within a 50-mile radius in this muddy corner of North Carolina where a person might make more than $8 an hour."
LeDuff himself is one-eighth Native American (Ojibwa). The late "Gerald Boyd said I was the most diverse person he knows," LeDuff said of the only African American to become managing editor of the Times.
LeDuff acknowledged that the Times assigned reporter Dan Barry a new national column, "The Land," right after LeDuff had done the "American Album" series that might have qualified him for the job. And while Gitlin praised his new book about masculinity, "US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man," in the Feb. 1 edition of the Times, the Sunday Times Book Review panned it. "In the end, we only learn a whole lot about the true and twisted mind of one American man. Who happens to believe he's Everyman," Allison Glock wrote of LeDuff.
"I'm disappointed in what the place is. It's time for me to go," LeDuff said. "I don't know what I'm going to do. I want to spend time with my family. I've got a brand new baby," who is three months old.
