Paul Strohm

THREE STORIES ABOUT MASCULINITY   Stylist When I was seven or eight I wanted to style hair. On car trips my mother would remove the rat from her bun and shake it down and let me comb it while my father, ready to compromise for quiet, gripped the wheel. I played a lot with Billy, a low-demand boy in the neighborhood, who was willing to sit still in a chair on our front porch while I used a comb and little-kid scissors to shape and fiddle with his carroty hair. My mother would eventually say, brightly, I think it's time for Billy to go home now.   Meeting Girls My high school friends and I were afraid of girls but thought we should be meeting some. Wilbur (‘Stiff Sheet’) Coultis—a.k.a ‘Coitus’—claimed he knew how. Under his supervision, we went cruising every Friday night in Martin’s Nash Rambler. Seeing a girl walking, we’d slow the car so Coultis could roll down his window and shout ‘Yo, Snatch!’ before we sped away. Our friend Valentine pointed out after several weeks that this wasn’t working, and proposed ‘Hey, BeeBay!’ with no better results. Back at Martin’s we smoked cigarettes and complained about no luck. But that became Valentine’s nickname: ‘BeeBay.’   Affair I was having an affair with a woman whose husband wanted to meet me but she was opposed. No wonder, I said. Not why you think, she said. Why, then? Because, she said, everybody likes him and you’d become friends and cut me out. Eventually they reconciled and had me to dinner. They had the biggest baby I’d ever seen, even though they were both normal sized. While she was in the kitchen he and I got to talking and he was charming, all right. We should get together once in a while, he said, and I said, sure, let’s.         THREE STORIES ABOUT MUSIC   Genres When my son John was little he had a plastic ukelele with rubber strings.  One night he was going thrumma-thrumma on the strings. I asked what he was doing and he said, Writing songs. He went thrumma-thrumma again.  I asked what was that one and he said,  A rock and roll song. What was he going to call it?  ‘You Can Get It,’ he said.  After a while he went thrumma-thrumma again. What was that one, I asked, and he said, A country song. What are you going to call it, I wanted to know.  He said, ‘Ain’t Got None.’   Made Man Listening to Buddy Guy and Junior Wells.  Me sitting at the bar, everybody else about 23.  I was hallucinating that Junior was looking at me.  At the break, I saw him halfway across the room.  Then he was beside me at the bar.  Junior fucking Wells!  Hey, Old Man, you sellin? he said.  Oh Jeez!  Didn't I wish. I made frantic slapping and pounding gestures at my pockets, like something would normally be there.  Not tonight, I had to say.  Huh, he said, and withdrew. Some students came over.  Saw you talkin to Junior, one said.  Oh, yeah, I said.   Parties with Pixies I spent time with John in Boston in the late 80s, driving over the Berkshires from Williams College where I taught for a term.  John was hanging out with the Pixies, and once he took me over to Kim Deal’s apartment.  We sat around with Kim and Black Frederick, or whatever his moniker is, and some dope came out and we smoked a little.  A couple of years later, John mentioned that evening to a friend, who said, dubiously, you mean your dad has met the Pixies?  Met the Pixies?  (John said, bless him.) My dad parties with the Pixies.         THREE STORIES ABOUT OLD AGE   At the Clinic At the clinic, they always greet me with, How are you?   In that breezy, perfunctory way.  I always want to say back, How the fuck should I know?  After all, it’s their job.  They’re the ones who read my scans.  When my cancer comes back they’ll know it before I do.  Some of my friends are in the full-time patient mode, but that’s not my style.  I dress up sharp before I go there:  leather jacket, black jeans.  Even though I know black jeans aren’t cool anymore.  Hey, I’d flirt up those nurses, except for that stupid, How are you?   This Old House The 50’s ‘Hit Parade’ featured Snookie Lansen reprising the week’s pop hits.   ‘This Old House’ reigned for 25 record-setting weeks:     ‘This old house is a-gittin’ empty/ This old house is a-gittin’ old/ This old house lets in the rain,/ This old house lets in the cold . . .’   Week after week, he and cheerful associates donned white carpenters’ pants and mounted ladders and grabbed hammers to mime effortless repair.  Now old, I grasp this song’s origins.  It’s about time and bodily decay.  Where is Snookie now?  The sneak thief enters through an aperture no hammer or nail can close.   Late Life Hero In clubs I’m so far off the demographic that I lurk beside the soundboard and pretend I’m with the label.  I avoid dancefloors where I’m the oldest guy.   My eyebrows need trimming every few days.  At least I win at racquetball, alarming opponents with my purple complexion and copious sweats.  And I foiled a crime.  One night I was awakened by shattering glass and—no pajamas--rushed a guy breaking in.  Confronted by a skinny old naked guy wreathed in a blaze of light, he dropped his tools and ran.  Good thing.  Captured, he might have sued for emotional distress.       - - - - - -

Paul Strohm is Garbedian Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.  He has written quite a few scholarly books, but these stories--drawn from a manuscript of '100 100-Word Stories' of which he has currently completed 99--represent a new departure for him.