Dirk Necessary, A Man’s Man’s Journey:
EXCERPT…
A full school year had passed and I hadn’t grown even an inch. Still dead last. Smallest. Weakest. A real loser’s loser. A brutal verdict of my standing in the world.
On the bright side, the kids only remembered two names, the first and last on the list. History made by yours truly. Four years in a row. A name never forgotten. My legacy.
I hated it. That original name that is. The one I started life with. The one printed at the bottom of the list posted on the gym wall. The stomachache, ever-present, knowing it could be written or spoken any moment for all to hear or see. I hid from bullies and even teachers but my name was impossible to avoid. And, there it was staring back at me.
I stood in front of the list, acid in my stomach boiling over, and contemplated a worse situation. A disciplined habit.
Each school year started and ended with the ‘Measure Up’ in gym class. This invasive physical assessment included, body height and weight, push-up, sit-up, and pull-up counts, 100-yard sprint and one-mile run times. The results were posted, publicly, for god and everyone to see. To scrutinize. Someone had to be first. Someone had to be last. Logical. A simple truth. I knew the first position was not mine to hope for. Not to be last, that was a reasonable wish.
If only I had a bottle from which to rub a wish-granting genie.
“Maybe next year, eh?” Jimmy Pockets said as he scanned the list. That wasn’t his real name. The Jimmy part was but the kids mostly called him Pockets on the count of how his hands were in his pockets most of the day. Pants pockets. Jacket pockets. Shirt pockets. His mom had even sewn pockets on clothes that didn’t have pockets to begin with. Including the t-shirts he wore in gym class. Pockets had just found his name listed right above mine. Second from the last…
Dirk Necessary, A Man’s Man’s Journey, is a novella length (30,000 words) adult fabulism tale of a teenaged boy on a personal quest to discover the man within himself. He is driven to this quest by an external world which views him as less than manly, a diminutive stature, and a name that is decidedly girlish. Lacking a strong male figure or directed rights-of-passage, he turns to his confidants, Heather Locklear, KISS, Reggie Jackson, Walter Payton, and his horse for guidance and support. They tell our young hero that real men, “have mustaches, are tall, have muscles, get in fights and win most of them, are not afraid to get dirty and avoid bathing, play sports, smoke cigarettes, are brave and courageous, and are lady’s men.” With this list in hand, he strides, at times stumbles, through an intention driven coming of age pursuit. He is accompanied by his imagination, an unwavering optimism, a fascination with Latin phrases and ancient Greek philosophers, and his sagely horse, Balthazar. Along his journey, he finds a perspective on manhood that both conforms to and contradicts the societal norms. His culminating act to release the man within is to legally change his name to Dirk Necessary.
