Some years ago I was dining at a fast food restaurant in downtown Houston. While I was placing my order at the counter, the young man taking the order appeared to be distracted. He wasn’t looking at me or his touch-screen; rather, he was looking at something going on behind me. I didn’t bother to turn around, so I didn’t know what it was. The next thing I know, he’s speaking to the manager on an intercom: “Mr. (can’t remember his name), we have an undesirable in the dining room.”
I figured he didn’t mean me, so I turned around and saw a bedraggled man dipping his bare hands into the salad bar and chowing down. Yes, I thought, that sort of behavior is definitely undesirable for a number of reasons.
Of course, everyone does undesirable things in the course of a lifetime, but few will be branded an undesirable. It is a status fraught with stigma and not one to be bestowed lightly, which might explain why Cecil was tolerated for so long.
No one ever accused Cecil of being a role model, but that phrase did not exist when I was a lad. Oh, one occasionally heard of a paragon who was a “good influence” or a rounder who was a “bad influence,” and it was possible to “fall in with a bad crowd,” as happened to Pinocchio. Even though he had a benign toymaker for a father figure, he was led astray. Then again, what marionette isn’t looking for someone to animate him?
In a sense, a “real boy” is like a marionette in search of someone who can animate him. Every adult male is a potential role model for a boy. Not that a boy consciously places all the adult males in his purview on some sort of internal balance scales weighing positive and negative traits, but at some level deep in his psyche, it occurs to him that he could grow up to be “that guy.” If so, he must wonder if it is desirable or undesirable to be “that guy.”
“That guy” could be one’s father or grandfather or uncle. He could be a teacher or a coach. He could be a celebrity of some sort. How many Little Leaguers have aped the batting stance of major league sluggers? How many teenage boys modeled their appearance after James Dean or the Beatles or some other pop culture idol?
On the other hand “that guy” could be the mailman, the clerk at the local convenience store, or a local drug dealer. Or someone like Cecil.
Cecil was not a relative but he was relative-adjacent. He was a friend of my uncle. In the summertime, he and my uncle would often go fishing. I sometimes encountered him when I visited my uncle’s house. Cecil was tolerated by the womenfolk but they were not enthusiastic about him. Granted, he was a bachelor. But that was really all they could hold against him.
Cecil had a good-paying job (an engineer); he wasn’t a criminal, a druggie, or an alcoholic. By all appearances, he was an even-tempered soul. In good conscience, no one could claim he was the proverbial “bad influence.” But he was a divorced man with no apparent desire to get married again. Worse than that, he appeared to be content with his lot in life. I hesitate to say he was thriving, but he certainly wasn’t floundering.
I didn’t give him much thought when I was young. Since we were of different generations, I rarely engaged him in conversation. In later years, however, he often came to mind. Married adult men were the standard in those days. This was not the Victorian era, so it was not unusual for a man to be divorced, but he usually remarried within the next few years. Cecil was the exception. Having been bucked off the horse once, he had no desire to get back in the saddle.
In mid-20th Century USA, no one ever said that getting married was mandatory but when one looked around and saw that all the adult males one knew were married, one intuited that it was a requirement for adult male status. The single man, assuming he was not a queer duck, was at least an odd duck. How could he ever be fulfilled without a wife and kids? Without intending to do so, Cecil showed that bachelorhood was a viable option.
I’m sure Cecil never looked at himself as a role model for the youth of America. But as I said earlier in this article, every man is a role model, like it or not. A grandfather or a father might be conscious of this status and strive to be a positive figure in his son’s/grandson’s life. But no man asks to be a role model for his entire sex. It is simply the way things are. Of course, there are boys who have women as role models, but that is another topic.
Today, thanks to the delayed age of first marriages and the divorce rate, there are more Cecils than ever before. Some will eventually marry or remarry; others, despite the blandishments of relatives and friends, will remain lifelong bachelors. They too will be role models simply by existing.
With legions of bachelors at large, it is not so difficult for a single man to find other single men to socialize with. There is no formal diktat that a single man who gets married must ostracize his single male friends, but it seems to work out that way. Usually, it is a means of keeping peace in the family. The wife realizes that male bonding takes attention away from her needs, so she puts her foot down. Married male friends are acceptable, however, since they provide more opportunities for socializing as a couple. The single male who is in the market for a significant other might be tolerated, at least for a while, but as for those who have no intention of tying the knot…highly suspect.
If a married woman has a son or two or three, the stakes are even higher. The wife doesn’t want her husband’s single friends to influence her sons because she wants grandchildren! Of course, if the single male friend is a boozer, a druggie, a criminal, or some other ne’er-do-well or underachiever, it is easy enough to point him out as a bad role model. But what to do if his only shortcoming is being a bachelor? How to prohibit him from the family circle when that is the only entry on his rap sheet?
And that was the case with Cecil. His only sin was being a middle-aged man with no intention of getting married again. Then again, my uncle and aunt had no sons, only daughters, so there were no impressionable young men in the immediate family – only me, an impressionable nephew, in the extended family.
I never knew anything about Cecil’s sexual life, but I don’t recall ever seeing him with a woman. For all I know, he could have been a formidable fornicator. Or he might have had a mistress stashed away somewhere. Or maybe he was celibate. Whatever his lot in life, he always seemed content. While the pursuit of happiness has been embedded into the American way of life since the Declaration of Independence, contentment is nowhere mentioned.
A man does not pursue contentment; it comes to him – if he’s fortunate. And it is not the same as happiness. This may be why women distrust a man who is content. He is more passive than active. They want a man who is not content, someone with drive, which indicates he will fight tooth and claw to provide more goodies for her and her offspring. A single man who is content with his lot in life (“a confirmed bachelor” used to be the term) is hardly a criminal, but he might as well be. Even if he is an upstanding citizen in every other respect, he will always be an undesirable “that guy.” He might even be labeled a misogynist or a woman-hater. Even if he never opines one way or the other about the opposite sex.
Most of the times I saw Cecil at my uncle’s home he talked about fishing or the stock market, or various topics in the news. Only once did he ever offer an opinion on womanhood. He was sitting on the back porch with my uncle, his wife, my mother, and my grandmother. I was there too, of course. I was not a talkative child but my ears worked just fine.
Perhaps Cecil had downed one beer too many, or maybe he had a testosterone spike that evening, or maybe he was in one of those poke-the-beehive moods. I don’t remember the context of the conversation, but at one point, he made the assertion that women should drop dead at 40. Needless to say, he was all alone in the lion’s den and the lionesses responded predictably…after a brief pause while they pondered if he had really said what he said.
My uncle did not defend him. He stayed out of it. I can’t blame him. After all, he had to live with the lionesses; Cecil didn’t. After Cecil went home, there was plenty of commentary along the lines of “Who does he think he is? God’s gift to women?”
If he had been a suspect before, now he was adjudged guilty, though not of being a sexist (that word didn’t exist back then). He had dared to say the unsayable. Deep down, every woman over 40 knows that her sex appeal is running on empty, and she does not like to be reminded of it.
Well, I would not advise any man to parrot Cecil’s dictum today in mixed company, and only with great discretion at a stag party. Some thoughts – I almost said truths – are best left unexpressed. Unless one has the cover of an alias or an avatar.
I have no idea what happened to Cecil. Since he was middle-aged while I was a boy, I’m sure he is dead. Did he have any regrets on his deathbed? For all I know, he died in his sleep or faded away in a nursing home. I doubt he was surrounded by loved ones wishing him bon voyage before he embarked on the big sleep. I could be wrong – maybe he had brothers or sisters or cousins or nephews or nieces, but he had no offspring. He might have worn Fruit of the Loom undies but there were no fruit-of-his-loins survivors.
It might be tempting to label Cecil as MGTOW, but in his day there was no such acronym. He was not trying to make a social or political statement. Even if he wanted to, it would have been futile; in those days there weren’t enough Cecils to be a political force. He was just a mellow fellow enjoying life as he knew it. He did not proselytize for bachelorhood even as he embodied its advantages.
Whether Cecil knew it or not, whether he wanted to be or not, he was a role model; not the only one in my life, not the most prominent, but one who lingers in my mind many decades later. He wasn’t the only “that guy” I encountered while growing up. But he was one of “those guys.”
Perhaps you have or had a Cecil/”that guy” in your life. Was he a positive influence? Or was he an undisirable in the dining room of life?
