Tough Guys

Fancy yourself a tough guy? Well, let me tell you about tough guys.

Tough guys join the Navy at sixteen, move away from their families, get ten tattoos at the same time including a big goddam black panther on a forearm and a "Mom" heart on the chest. They stop over in Mexico, buy 96 beers from a shiv-wielding hood in an alley, buy five cartons of cigarettes from a leper named Paul and go back to the ship heroes.

Tough guys get their pictures in the Edmonton Journal after getting their heads split open from high sticks while playing hockey with no helmet, and a few years later they bust their shoulders while throwing body checks that get them suspended.

Tough guys have a five year old and a newborn by the time they're twenty-five and they work weekend overtime, they take side jobs for next to nothing, they bust their asses because that's what is best for the family and they do it.

Tough guys have big scars on their foreheads from the time they faceplanted into the windshield of a 1975 T-Bird after crashing into a Pinto while not wearing a seatbelt, and their wives worried that the kids had lost a Father as they got carried off in an ambulance.

Tough guys teach their sons how to swear, shoot a gun, ride a bike, swim in a lake, fist fight if they have to, whistle at girls, drink whiskey, take out the garbage, buy dirty magazines, use a sawzall without cutting off a hand, replace a wall switch without getting fried, and how to deal swiftly and effectively with other men who want to sleep with their wives.

Tough guys should be able to fix the dishwasher, make something out of wood, threaten the Father of the bully down the block, change a crappy diaper, read three chapters of Moby Dick, and then make sweet love to their wives – all in the span of an evening.

Tough guys embrace midlife crisis by buying a motorcycle and driving from Edmonton to Halifax alone, because that's how it's got to be, and to a man, the open road is a woman ever faithful.

Tough guys fuck up and lose everything because they don't know what to do sometimes, and it crushes them to realize that all that muscle is just a fleeting monument.

Tough guys have heart attacks and almost die on the bedroom floor and then they complain about hospital food, have to go back for corrective surgery because they thought they were Superman, and that chopping wood six weeks after a triple bypass would get them back in the ring, and they flirt with the nurses and give them a hard time because that's how it's got to be.

Tough guys bury both parents within six months of each other. They nearly lose it when they have to bury their big brothers a few months after that - their family taken from them at the all too young age of 55, suddenly leaving nothing but the sum of memories.

After all that, tough guys look in the mirror and wonder how much they've got left; how many lessons they could still give these freeloading punks who don't know their asses from a tailpipe; how many tattoos have not faded; how many more times their sons will call them Dad.