Between the Tool-Belt Set and the Jet Set
By RICK MARIN
Published: August 8, 2004
NOTHING like a presidential campaign to get a man thinking about the important things in life, like himself.
Not just what kind of man am I going to vote for, but what kind of man am I? Which of the Democrats' "two Americas" do I belong to? The America that "does the work," as John Edwards says, or "reaps the rewards," that "pays the taxes" or "gets the tax breaks"? The one "struggling to get by" or that "can buy anything it wants"?
Or neither, but somewhere in between — an unsettling feeling of unbelonging I think of as Male Status Anxiety.
Mine set in acutely five years ago, when my wife and I bought a house in the Hamptons because we couldn't afford to rent. We couldn't afford to buy now, either, but we sneaked in before they closed the curtain between Business and Economy. I hasten to add that we live on a street not of gabled McManses but 1950's ranch houses and modest split-levels, populated entirely by locals. They are plumbing contractors, masons, high school teachers — people more likely to attend pancake breakfasts at the volunteer fire department than charity barbecues at Peter Jennings's house.
We've never been to Peter Jennings's either, but to our neighbors we must look like the Other America, with our S.U.V. in the driveway, sprinklered lawn and new gunite pool.
"I'm not rich like you people!" the guy who lives behind us shouted once in a dust-up over a property line.
If only. To him, we may seem loaded, just as he must to the Hispanic laborers who work for $15 a day and live in parts of the Hamptons you never even see.
But just because we've dropped $200 at dinner at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor with our hedge-fund-manager/real-estate-mogul friends doesn't mean we can afford it. When that bill comes, our table mates casually whip out their American Express black cards and ready rolls of cash, while I break a flop-sweat wondering if my 24.9 percent A.P.R. plastic has hit its monthly melting point. Compared with a guy with not one but two private jets, I'm poor.
Class is a masculinity-defining issue, and I'm getting hit from both sides.
My tool-belted neighbors are man enough to aerate their own lawns, shingle their own houses, self-install their pools. Effete city boy that I am, I have to hire people to do those things. For my mole infestation, I'm paying a pest-control guy $175 to set traps, then remove the bloodied carcasses. The average local Joe would just take a shovel back there at the crack of dawn and guillotine the vermin himself. Next to the Bob (and Babs) Vilas all around me, I'm like those overly evolved "Star Trek" aliens who communicated through throbbing veins in their giant foreheads.
My head throbs when I write checks. But the small army of service people I'm forced to employ don't know that — and I feel their disdain for my unmanliness.
A carpenter came the other day to install adjustable closets. As soon as he'd finish one, I'd put the clothes back in. He said, "Your wife's going to be real happy the way you're organizing everything so neat." I explained, with a lot of macho swagger, that I was the neat one. I wouldn't trust my wife with the closets.
"What?" the carpenter shouted, as he did every time I said anything.
Figuring I must be speaking too softly, or effetely, I repeated, with extra-loud manliness, "I'm the neat one!"
Then I realized he was wearing earplugs.
I think of my life out here as a cross between "A Year in Provence" and "Straw Dogs" — the 1971 Sam Peckinpah movie I saw again not long ago. Dustin Hoffman is a mathematician who moves with his sexy English wife (Susan George) to her village in rural England, where they're mocked and bullied by a gang of townies working on their house. Mr. Hoffman's character takes the abuse — then his mild-mannered math nerd fights back, asserting his manhood in a fury of Peckinpah ultraviolence.
But how do I assert mine, when neither tool belt nor money belt seems to fit? I'm Banana Republic belt. My own Straw Dog impulses only snap in crazed Starbucks outbursts. "What's taking my Frappuccino so long?!" Demanding my money back and storming out. I need help.
Seeking solace and wisdom, I consulted Alain de Botton's new book, "Status Anxiety," and found this quotation from the 18th-century philosopher David Hume: "It is not a great disproportion between ourselves and others which produces envy, but on the contrary, proximity." In fact, psychological research has documented the same phenomenon. People are more or less happy when their income is equivalent to their neighbors' — whether they earn $350,000 a year or $35 an hour.
But in the Hamptons everyone is painfully proximate. A friend of mine pulled his Range Rover out of a gas station recently and two teenagers shouted after him, "We hate you!"
"Why?"
"Because you're not from here!"
"You don't know that!" he said.
Yes they did.
My next-door neighbor, a jack-of-many-trades who was born in the house his own family now lives in, once asked me plaintively, "There are a million small towns — why do they have to come here?"
It took me a while to realize that "they" meant me. I'm not one of them, I wanted to explain. But I wasn't one of him, either.
There aren't two Americas, but three: rich, poor and all us monkeys in the middle, comparing and calibrating ourselves against the guy above and the guy below, in the tax bracket of It's-Never-Quite-Enough.
Mr. de Botton recommends art as a cure for status anxiety. Maybe the way to campaign to this underrepresented constituency is to go with some poetry, something upbeat, optimistic, like Robert Browning: "A man's reach should exceed his grasp/Or what's a mortgage for?"
I feel better already.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/fashion/08BETA.html>
Carl
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