My Husband, The Prick.
Mood:  crushed out
Topic: The Tao of Ben
There are those who have expressed shock at my reference, in this blog, to my husband as a prick. That is your chosen mate and the father of your children, they say, or words to that effect. How can you say such terrible things about him?

It's true that Ben is an absolute masterpiece of a man and that I love him very dearly. However: He is a prick. (Hi honey! Kisses!) I am not just saying this, either. I have solid proof, to wit:

He is smarter than I am. Intelligent men aren't ordinarily a problem for me; with the exception of that commodities trader I dumped to start dating Ben, I've tended to gravitate toward brilliant men. However, he is brighter than I am and has the statistics to prove it: According to standardized tests way back when, his IQ is 154 and mine is only 145. That's nine whole points, you prick. Of course, we have to account for some of the pruning of brain cells we did in the '70s and '80s, which might have equalized things a bit, but according solely to the numbers, I'm his mental inferior.

Of course, you may be thinking. He's a lawyer, isn't he? You should expect him to be very intelligent. Well, no; that's not accurate. The California Bar is populated with a startling percentage of abject idiots, and as for the rest of them, for the most part they aren't so much intelligent as they are cagey.

However, I first met Ben when he was my boss for two months on a temp assignment, and it's true that he was pretty much the first attorney I'd ever worked for where I didn't secretly think I was smarter than he was. For once I wasn't thinking You should be sitting in here drafting my points and authorities, and could you please, please try to grasp the proper use of the comma? So I guess I should have seen it coming. What I didn't see coming was what an insufferable know-it-all -- insufferable prick -- he can be. Worse, I'm probably not much better.

He is more well-read than I am. This is particularly goading because my bachelor's is in English literature, whereas he majored in something reprehensible related to business or economics, and his postgraduate degrees are an MBA and a JD. Not a liberal arts degree in sight. Yet that prick is far better versed in history and literature than I am. It's true that he's a little weak on modern American literature and to some extent on Shakespeare, but he's well versed in Chaucer and has plowed through more DH Lawrence and Tolstoy than I ever managed to do.

However, being well-read doesn't make him a total prick. On our first date, Ben completely charmed me by announcing that James Joyce's Ulysses was "gibberish". I squealed with delight. "That's exactly what I've always thought!" I crowed. Do you know how much time I spent, as an undergrad in English, listening to people have on about how brilliant and profound Joyce's works are, and Ulysses in particular? The entire time, I was thinking what a bunch of incomprehensible bullshit it was; but Ben was the first person I ever met who dared to say it. Besides, a guy who discusses Joyce on the first date instantly makes a girl like me weak in the knees. I vowed immediately to have sex with him whenever possible and to spend a ton of time with him, even though he is absolutely not meant to know more about literature than I do, and therefore he is a prick.

He is instinctively condescending. This must be a corollary of being smarter than everyone else; during conversations with me, even after all these years, he will automatically launch into explanations of the most axiomatic concepts of science or sociology. Well, maybe not axiomatic to the coke-addled trust fund babies he hung out with at Beverly Hills High, but axiomatic to anyone with the mental wherewithal to think beyond series TV and French Vogue. It makes me nuts: Don't you condescend to me, you prick, I tell him. I don't have big enough tits to be a bimbo. And then I blow him a Bronx cheer, flip him the bird, and kiss him, and we continue our conversation.

He invariably beats me at backgammon. In my undergrad days, I was pretty damned good. Scott and I used to play everyone in his dorm, and although I would lose a few games from time to time, I could beat all the guys fairly routinely. That is, until that prick Ben came along. It's not that I lose to him once in a while -- he beats me every single goddamned fucking time, without exception. Clearly there is some sort of bad magic at work, there; you could play a series of games with a chimp, and statistically speaking, at some point the chimp would have to win. It drives me absolutely insane, and I have been known to pout and say I'm not playing anymore and stomp off like any three-year-old. Because I am just not meant to lose like that, is why.

His sense of humor is even more offensive than mine is. And that is really saying something, because I have an appalling sense of humor; I have had female acquaintances who have completely stopped speaking to me because of some obscene and/or misogynistic joke I've told. Which is stupid, really; as Steve Martin's character pointed out in the movie My Blue Heaven, most people think they have good senses of humor, but they don't, really. Anyone who would be offended by a joke about how a pregnant woman is different from a light bulb (you can unscrew a light bulb) just isn't made for this world and should go hide in a shoebox.

Ben, though, has some material so shocking that he can make even me howl in protest: Honey, that is just plain wrong, and no one should ever say that. I mean, you are talking about actual sex with animals, for crying out loud. Does this stop him? It does not, because he is a prick, and part of his amusement in telling these jokes is in watching people run screaming for the exits. (In fact, he confessed to me that he used to deliberately say appalling things on first dates, in order to screen out girls who would find his sense of humor intolerable. Which turned out, he says, to be almost all of them.)

A large portion of his material is original, and almost all of it is pretty startling. These are a couple of the cleanest, most printable examples I can think of:

One day he burst into song, his own take on that little Peter Paul Mounds/Almond Joy advertising jingle. You remember. Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don't. Except Ben's version was:

Sometimes a dick's in your butt
Sometimes it's not.

Do you see what I mean? People just don't go about saying things like that. They certainly don't expect to hear other people say them. And Ben, that prick, enjoys playing these things for shock value.

Another story I found appalling was a famous prank he and his friend Bob (whose sense of humor is so disgusting that he makes Ben look like a Sunday school teacher) played on another guy. They gave him the Elephant Walk. I don't know; maybe all guys do this; but it involves turning both your front pockets inside out, opening your fly, pulling out your unit, and walking menacingly toward someone. You see? Pockets = elephant ears. Penis = trunk. Horrifying.

Worse, as you see, Ben's shtick tends to be terribly gay, which also raises disturbing questions. My husband is as heterosexual as they come (except for a suspicious affection for Rock Hudson/ Doris Day movies), but he knows the shock value of appearing gay, and he isn't afraid to do it, and he loves how it makes people uncomfortable. See? Total prick.

Finally, I can't stay mad at him for more than a minute. This really cheeses me off. Several times I've had good and righteous reasons to be extremely pissed off at him, like the time he stood me up for a dinner date and went and sat in a bar for two hours before he remembered to call me, or the time the first year we were married when he went away to Lake Nacimiento for the weekend and didn't tell me until I saw his water ski in the back of the car, whereupon he announced that he was leaving in ten minutes and that I was staying home to feed and walk the dog and let in the repairmen.

You see? Real prick maneuvers. Yet on each occasion, just as I was asserting my righteous indignation, he said something to totally crack me up and charm me. "Fuck you," I used to tell him. "I'm so fucking pissed off at you right now, I'm going to go off and start making voodoo dolls. Now could you please stop being so fucking endearing for a minute so I can get on with that?" Prick. And then he would grin at me, and say something funny, and kiss me, and thus get himself completely out of trouble.

I think you can agree he's a prick. But, you know, it's like I said. All the really good ones can be pricks at times. It's all a matter of whether they make it worth your while.