Warts and all-Part 2, -There’s a man here to see you

“Madam, there’s a man here to see you”.  The words cut into me like a knife through butter on a hot July day. “There’s a man here to see you”!  Suffice to say that I am not yet comfortable with being referred to as that man. I answer to dude, guy, fella, and sweet lips (I have very interesting weekends!)
But man is for a guy with a mortgage and a drinking problem that he is in denial about.

I’m at the stage of life where many of the people I started school with are starting to get married or move out of the country for work. Major life decisions are being made and not being one to be left behind, I’m making my own moves. I look in the mirror and I see an adult. I see whiskers that need trimming, I no longer get asked for ID at bars and I actually get paid for my services. My parents lean on me to handle my younger siblings and I now get a say in many ways in which family business will be handled. I’m handling my business.

So why does it throw me off every time I’m referred to as that man? Am I still infatuated with the idea of being a kid and having my whole life ahead of me still? Am I just neurotic?

I remember the first time I saw a naked man. It was like staring at the sun, I knew if I kept looking, my eyes would get hurt really bad. The man in question was a senior five student and me, the fresh senior one in boarding school for the first time, had carried my bucket of bathing water into the communal showers and had, unbeknownst to me, stumbled into the senior wing of the showers.

There’s something very weird about seeing a man’s body when you’re just starting puberty and the appearance of body hair is all you hope to have so that you don’t just look like a freshly plucked hen when you go swimming with your buds. Well, this guy was the Mandingo. Hairy and muscular and covered in suds, and had what can only be described as a baby’s arm holding an orange in between his legs. At 12 years old, I had already decided size matters.

As I scurried away, I hoped that his screaming, “Gwe S1, what are you doing?” meant that he hadn't gotten a look at my face and probably later all us S1’s would do communal work like slashing the compound for the transgression of one of our number. I remember looking at myself later in the nude and wondering when my body would become a man’s body. When my voice would command audience like my father’s or when I’d be comfortable in my own body.

Being a man at 12 meant having the body of a builder. Earlier in life, it meant knowing what the world was about. Adults were always giving me advice and I would hear professions like lawyer, architect, and mechanic and think these giant people who seemed to know everything had it all together. They must be the smartest people in the world.

Then you start to grow up and you hear your dad lie on the phone one time. Or you notice that the city you live in doesn't look like the ones in the movies which would mean those sharp architects and engineers were not as good as their titles seemed to suggest. These fuckers had you duped. They didn't know anywhere near as much as they appeared to. They were bullshitters just like my friends and I, only with better clothes and bigger toys. These people we ran to for answers didn't have any!

I walked into the ladies office and we discussed the proposal I’d been sent to deliver and walked out and said good bye to the lady that had called me a man and I shook her hand with confidence and left the office all  the while thinking, “gosh, I am become man”..I’m older and society says that I am at the apex, that I can take the wheel. And I just want to scream, “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing”. I think that’s what unnerves me; the fact that what I thought a man, an adult was is so different from what it actually is, from what I am.

 Sure, certain and steady and got it together? Well, Sometimes. But most times, I’m still figuring it all out. Hmm, perhaps being a man is being man enough to admit that you don’t know shit, but you’re just trying to do the best you can. And at least I know now that things look bigger when you’re a kid right?I need to get that mandingo out of my head!!!!