The "Good Man Club" (#1)

I was reading the personals the other day, and I ran across an ad entitled “Where are all the good men hiding?” I thought about writing to the woman and telling her about our secret clubhouse craftily hidden in a bunker underneath Old Navy, and that we meet there every night and talk about how lonely we are, and eventually someone says, “Hey! We should open the club to women!” This is always followed by great excitement and animated conversation with lots of sweeping hand gestures and hoots of glee, but then we remember that none of us know where the good women are, and after a long, desultory silence we all get in our cars and go home.

Day after day, our “I AM A GOOD MAN” tattoos discreetly concealed under our clothing, we practice our professions as writers, UPS drivers, organic pasta chefs, septic tank pumpers, and those guys who you always see in industrial training videos walking around clean rooms in white coats carrying clipboards. Occasionally, we raise our eyes from our work, fruitlessly scanning the area for signs of a good woman, but we all missed the day in high school Health class when they taught the guys how to recognize one, so we all wind up watching the girl in the tight slacks instead, wondering if she has “I AM A GOOD WOMAN” tattooed on her butt. There’s just no diplomatic way to ascertain this without surrendering our “good man” certification, though, so it invariably remains a mystery.

So I consider responding to this woman’s ad and telling her all this, and perhaps offering to send her a picture of my “I AM A GOOD MAN” tattoo, but then I realize that if word got out about the tattoos, pretty soon ALL the guys would get them, and there would be no way to tell us apart anymore. Then it would be like two guys, each with a Ph.D., one of them in Neurosurgery and the other in Comparative Philology. One of them is saving lives and making a million dollars a year, and the other guy is saying, “You want fries with that?” and swatting flies on the grill with a beat-up copy of “Beyond Good and Evil.” Also, part of the “G” in my tattoo has faded a little bit, so it looks like it says “I AM A COOD MAN.” I need to get that touched up.

In the end, she sounded so sweet and funny that I decided to write to her anyway, and just leave out the part about the clubhouse and the tattoos. It took me a while to write my reply because I really wanted to say something thoughtful and responsive. Also, I had to go help a friend tow his car home after he hit a moose on the freeway, and of course we couldn’t just let the moose lie there, so we strapped him to the top of my car and took him to the vet first. (I think my next car is going to be a pickup truck, because this convertible top is way too delicate for carrying huge palmate ruminants.)

In any case, I finally finished my intelligent (but not pompous), substantial (but not too long) and moderately witty (but not offensive) reply, but I still haven’t sent it. In all the time I’ve been in the “good man” club, nobody has ever written any of us back, and we’re all pretty discouraged. Except that one time that Svetlana girl wrote back to Phil, but when he called the number she gave him, he got some kind of Ukrainian sex chat line. She must have mistyped it or something.

Anyway, part of being a “good man” is overcoming the discouragement that is an occasional and unavoidable part of life, so I am going to send her the e-mail I wrote. I won’t expect a response, but I’ll be happy if I get one, even if it doesn’t turn into anything but a few exchanges of e-mail. It’s been a while since I got to know a woman well enough to trust her with the secret of my “I AM A GOOD MAN” tattoo, and I’m really looking forward to the moment when its strategic location is revealed to a new lover for the first time, and to hear the inevitable question: “Why do you have ‘IAMAN’ tattooed on your... wait... oh!”