Charlie LeDuff - US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man
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Heir to Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie LeDuff scours the country, tossing back whiskey with the seedy, the dreamy, and the strange in search of the soul of the American male.
No one knows lifes underbelly better than New York Timesreporter Charlie LeDuff. Christened the bibulous scribe of the working class by his peers, hes made a career chronicling, with dead-on feel for character and idiom, the gritty lives of the drifters, the forgotten, and the strange-people washed up and washed out on alcohol, broken dreams, lifetimes of hard living. Willing to follow his subjects where no respectable white-collared man would dare go, he is clearly-and admittedly-a writer not for people who have doormen, but for doormen. And while his wholly original coverage of this beat has brought him acclaim as a journalist, it has also made him something of a working-class hero.
Who better, then, to examine what it means to be a man in modern-day America? US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man is LeDuffs equally intoxicated and intoxicating journey across the country in search of the heart and soul of todays American male. With characteristic audacity, compassion, and humor, he takes part in a Bacchanalian Burning Man festival in Nevada, clad in a Mohawk and little else; trains with the sadhearted Russian clown of a traveling circus; leads a cavalry charge down the Little Bighorn River with war reenactors; joins a C-level professional football team; infiltrates a West Oakland bike gang that holds fight parties; travels with Appalachian snake handlers and tent revivalists; and covers a cowboy love story at a gay rodeo (Not like the movie. Life is never like the movies. Life is messy and complicated and self-loathing and funny). At each juncture LeDuff faithfully records their religion and sins and racism, their freaks and misfits, their search for the American dream, and the sweetness they find in living it out, if only for a moment.
request filled
Heir to Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie LeDuff scours the country, tossing back whiskey with the seedy, the dreamy, and the strange in search of the soul of the American male.
No one knows lifes underbelly better than New York Timesreporter Charlie LeDuff. Christened the bibulous scribe of the working class by his peers, hes made a career chronicling, with dead-on feel for character and idiom, the gritty lives of the drifters, the forgotten, and the strange-people washed up and washed out on alcohol, broken dreams, lifetimes of hard living. Willing to follow his subjects where no respectable white-collared man would dare go, he is clearly-and admittedly-a writer not for people who have doormen, but for doormen. And while his wholly original coverage of this beat has brought him acclaim as a journalist, it has also made him something of a working-class hero.
Who better, then, to examine what it means to be a man in modern-day America? US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man is LeDuffs equally intoxicated and intoxicating journey across the country in search of the heart and soul of todays American male. With characteristic audacity, compassion, and humor, he takes part in a Bacchanalian Burning Man festival in Nevada, clad in a Mohawk and little else; trains with the sadhearted Russian clown of a traveling circus; leads a cavalry charge down the Little Bighorn River with war reenactors; joins a C-level professional football team; infiltrates a West Oakland bike gang that holds fight parties; travels with Appalachian snake handlers and tent revivalists; and covers a cowboy love story at a gay rodeo (Not like the movie. Life is never like the movies. Life is messy and complicated and self-loathing and funny). At each juncture LeDuff faithfully records their religion and sins and racism, their freaks and misfits, their search for the American dream, and the sweetness they find in living it out, if only for a moment.
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Table of Contents
PENGUIN BOOKS
US GUYS
As a former national correspondent for The New York Times Charlie LeDuff has covered the war in Iraq, crossed the desert with Mexican migrants, and written about work and race in a North Carolina slaughterhouse for which he was co-awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In 2006 LeDuff produced a 10-part television show of participatory journalism, Only in America. He is the author of Work and Other Sins: Life in New York City and Thereabouts. He has contributed to Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone, among other places.
IN MEMORY OF NICOLE LEDUFF
PREFACE
There are certain things an American man should know. And if he does not know them, he at least has been convinced that he should somehow know them, even if they are a detriment to him.
The American man has been taught that while it is better to avoid a fight, he should have been in a fight; that honor cannot always be defended with reason. He should never admit fear. He should strive to put the blade in his adversarys chest, not his back. An American man should know how to load and fire a gun. He should know how to ride a horse, bet on a horse, bet on the stock market and bet on the cards. A good man should know a womans body and know how to please her. His woman, in turn, should never speak anything but well of him in public. An American man should have been raised in church, rejected the church and eventually found virtue in the church.
The American man should be educated. He should work. He should honor his debts and live within his means. He should be able to recite poetry and have bits of true philosophy at his fingertips. He should be able to play an instrument and know how to help a rose grow. An American man should dress and speak his language well. He should be handy and mechanically inclined and yet his nails must be clean. A man should have children, and at some point his children should reject him. And in the course of his life, a mans children should return and find virtue in him.
This is what an American man should be. Of course, no such man has ever existed and no man probably ever will. It may be that he prefers men. It may be that he was born weak-bodied. He may have been abandoned. He may be dull-witted. He may live in a trailer, or a ranch house, or a squat city apartment. Men crave dignity and fulfillment, and when they cannot attain those, they become unhappy, quarrelsome, small-minded, blowhards, overintellectuals, chauvinists, cowards, dopers, abstainers, aesthetes, racists, talk show know-it-alls and critics.
Some men are strong despite their shortcomings and are able to get on with the dreary business of living. This sort of man is at ease with the idea that in the great scheme of things, he means absolutely nothing.
And then there are the American men who, unable to grasp the Ideal, begin to call themselves a minority, a victim... they pine for those good old days that were never very good. They fall back on bromides and empty slogans; they demand action that they are not willing to take themselves. They are anxious and so they make excuses and tell lies. They criticize leadership because they can never lead. They take pills that give them feelings of enlargement but lack the abilities to sustain it. Still, these men are important. As they go, the world goes, and they are ensnared in a disorienting swirl of change.
This book is not a sociological study. It offers no solutions to the problems of crime, immigration, the economy, spiritual bankruptcy or other maladies afflicting the male citizen of the United States of America. It does not suppose to crawl into his brain. It is simply intended to be a conversation with him, a participatory look into his world, an attempt to feel what he feels. While this is not a memoir, there are personal bits of my history here; after all, I am one of these men. In that sense, looking back, this was a search for the angry, forgotten middling America from where I come.
US Guys, as the title implies, has a personal point of view: my subjects and mine. It is an American travelogue, a year spent on the road crisscrossing this great nation. What I found were the same worries and uncertainties, the same preoccupations in the minds of virtually every American man I spoke withnamely, race, sexuality, God, ambition, isolation, misunderstanding, fear.
You may notice some references in these stories to a camera, a crew, a producer. This book was born out of a television show, the name of which I am contractually obligated to withhold. The program, in my mind, was designed to seek out the American man at a profound time of war and debt and extravagance and sexual dysfunction and digitization and globalization and mass migration and so many other -ations that the people of this nation no longer understand what it is to be an American. And so I struck out with a camera and a notebook to explore certain ideas that consume the public conversation.
I hung with a biker club in Oakland, California, and brawled at one of their fight parties to find out why the American man is so aggressive and angry. I went to a gay rodeo in Oklahoma City and rode a bull to explore the notion of virility and manhood. I went to Oregon and became a trapeze clown with a one-ring circus because I wanted to talk with immigrants about what America looks like from their eyes. I went to Texas to play professional football to speak with men about race and prowess. I went to the Burning Man festival in the desert of Nevada to romp in the sandbox of counterculture. And so on.
You will find no stories of rich people in this book, nor will you find stories about the executive washroom. Why should you? You can find those in any respectable newspaper or magazine. The stories in this book are about average Americans, the majority of Americans.
A man, a journalist, recently wrote a popular book that discusses the interconnectedness of the new world and how in the face of global competition, American ambition has gone flat. He describes the average American as lazy, profligate, fat. The American lacks gumption, he wrote.
I doubt it. Consider that while our factories have moved to Mexico, the Mexicans still come north where wages are twenty times higher. If I could go to Canada and make $200 an hour, Id shovel horseshit with my bare hands. Most of us would. Somewhere in there lies the root of ambition.
In any case, sweeping people into the ash can of history is dangerous. Polemics about the future are of little use to those struggling today. To disregard these anxieties is to be unaware of the future that children of privilege face. Violence is my guess. Poverty breeds resentment. The rich cannot survive behind the gates.
You will also find little talk about the American woman. She is in this book, but hardly. Someday, someone, some woman most likely, with some ambition will write US Gals. It wont be me. I hardly understand women. I do know that women still judge themselves against man, still demand entrance into his clubhouse, still write and whisper silly little things to irritate his ego. I know they still play the carnal office games: stuffing their aging legs into stockings and half skirts, clucking pleasantly to their male colleagues while lying in wait to slit the throat of any other hen with the audacity to enter the barnyard. Do women still need men? Yes. Men are still necessary.
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