Posts by author
Thomas Page McBee
-
SELF-MADE MAN #11: Blood and Ceremony
I’m trying to tell you that there’s something steady inside each of us, something unconcerned with expectation or gender or fear. There’s a center, and it’s like a friendly ghost of every person we’ve ever been.
-
SELF-MADE MAN #10: Pride
Last June, after he showed me how to pull back on the syringe and shoot the air bubbles skyward, my nurse injected an oily universe of possibility into me.
-
SELF-MADE MAN #9: Passing
I don’t know if this is the biology of it, but on the day of my testosterone shot sometimes I think I can feel my vocal chords widening, a throaty expansion.
-
SELF-MADE MAN #7: Translator
Em and I were both poets in high school, though she is the last one standing, her body of work forming into something beautiful as the son in her belly. Back then I liked her because she never fell for…
-
SELF-MADE MAN #6: Observer Bias
I am in a good mood when I meet a woman with a severe, sophisticated haircut for a business lunch on a sunny patio in Back Bay. She asks about this column, about my manuscript. It seems that some people…
-
SELF-MADE MAN #5: Flipbook
It’s magic hour on a Thursday. In my living room I do side planks on a mat for 90 seconds, and then 10 hard chin-ups in three sets. I put weights in my backpack and feel like Superman, crushing 25…
-
SELF-MADE MAN #4: On Violence
I’m on the phone with my brother for the first time in months and my voice is deeper than he expected.
-
SELF-MADE MAN #3: Stitches
I walked in on Rob (not his real name), an ex-jock and Affleck-like Bostonian during a covert, one-man photo shoot in the men’s room at my new job this summer, and now—due to some untold mathematics of manliness—he’s my first…
-
SELF-MADE MAN #2: Old Stories
Look, it’s an old story, masculinity; usually discussed in terms of brutality and honor, power and powerlessness, and occasionally a highlighting of the tender underbelly that rises up no matter how much you try to push it down, like a…
-
SELF-MADE MAN #1: The Truckstop
I am in a public restroom off 95 in southern Maine, wondering what makes a man and also if I can muffle my piss stream with balled up toilet paper so as not to draw attention to myself. Will I…