Gentlemen
This month, my 15-years-old-or-so dog started wearing diapers. He was just peeing inside too much — usually in the only room of the apartment with carpet, but lately in the various doggie beds that we have scattered throughout the place so he doesn’t have to try and then fail at his scrambles onto couches and person beds. Henry has always had a bad leg, his arthritis has been getting bad for years, and getting up and down the stairs to the backyard is now a struggle most of the time. So I got him cloth diapers — they are called “pee bands” but we call them “penis belts” — to save stress and money on carpet spray. Plus, it’s the holiday season, and I am tired of my home smelling like piss.
My dog is a handsome terrier mix with a cowlike black-and-white pattern that I often refer to as a “statement neutral.” So, when it came time to pick out colors for the first pack of penis belts, I chose the combination titled “Gentleman”: one black, one grassy green, and one cobalt. These are good colors for Henry. Also, his full name is Lord Henry Humongous of Hoppers (with the sometimes, lately, added appellation of “The Ancient One”) so obviously he is a gentleman. Even though he’s actually a cranky terrorist who pees inside and doesn’t make dog friends easily. He’s always seemed like a Robert Mitchum type to us — a cool customer with an honor code guiding his mean streak — so, not exactly a gentleman. But maybe not exactly not one.
So, I get these pee bands. I start putting them on him, taking them off him, washing and drying them, and so on. Child-free by choice, the youngest of three, and never a babysitter, I somehow still know instinctively how to tell if they need washing without a touch or a sniff. And nine times out of ten when I am velcroing a pair on or pulling a pair off, turning the dryer on “tumble dry low” for a third time (our dryer sucks), I get this song in my head:
The Afghan Whigs record Gentlemen came out in 1993, when I was 21 years old. I was still getting my undergrad, and my two-year relationship with my first love was crumbling. Two big effects of this relationship on my later life: That I never developed a taste for Pabst Blue Ribbon or malt liquor (genuinely or ironically) because Matt started every night with PBR before moving on to Olde English; and that jealousy has no place in my romantic relationships (or friendships, for that matter) since my first love insisted I was sleeping with his boss and all of my male friends, despite my infatuation with him and our frankly incandescent sex life.
Those same male friends, the ones I was not sleeping with while I was with Matt (but some of whom I would definitely sleep with later) really liked this Afghan Whigs record. I did college radio, worked in record stores, and had a wide range of musical interests, but I don’t think this would have been so much on my radar if it weren’t for them. But listening to it now — the whole record, “Debonair” and “Fountain and Fairfax,” the whole damn thing — I am surprisingly grateful that it was. Because I’m struck by how feminist it is, or, at least, how much an exposé of toxic masculinity. And I remember thinking that at the time, as well, though I didn’t have the language for it. (My burgeoning feminism was probably another death knell for my relationship with Matt — shout-out to the handful of Women’s Studies classes available at the University of South Florida in the 1990s!)
If I had heard this record for the first time just four or five years later, when my full-time job was to think and write about music, I would have had the space to get it right away. The opening lines of the title track (“Ladies, let me tell you about myself/I got a dick for a brain/And my brain is gonna sell my ass to you.”) feel very real and honest in their ugliness, but they also could be taken as just, ya know, stupid clever. The terrible video above isn’t allowed to make its full point about the narrator being an everyman in his shitty behavior, focusing instead on the singer’s boyish forelock and hungry eyes. But they wanted you to get it. Because, as it stood for me at 21, the eighth track, “My Curse,” sung in a broken but resigned, raspy wail by Marcy Mays of fellow Ohio band Scrawl (who I interviewed on my college radio show back then, but that’s another story) really drove the point home. Greg Dulli is playing a character here, the title of the album is ironic, this man is an abusive asshole who cannot help himself. And this woman is a willing participant but, make no mistake, she is more the victim. We just listened to seven songs of his swaggering, horny confession, and we only think about her when she is finally allowed to speak. They included that song for a reason.
The men I spent time with in my 20s who loved this album, saw themselves in it, and perhaps learned from it the way male punks learned from Fugazi’s “Suggestion” — the world looks at the masculine with as many expectations as it does at the feminine. The world watches men in a different way. And while the female-presenting among us must work harder to make our voices heard, the menfolk must work harder to see themselves clearly, and do right by the rest of us. We all must be gentle with ourselves, whether that means looking with care and clarity at the ugliness in the mirror, getting out of an abusive relationship, or settling into our old age with acceptance and grace. So maybe my dog is a gentleman after all: One who barks like a big boy at others thrice his size, once fell in love with a purebred pug half his age, and is slowly, haltingly, learning to sit still while I snap on his diapers.
