When I was a kid my stepfather would orchestrate "guy" projects for us to do together. This was something he'd never bothered with before, he'd always been more than happy to ignore me, until I reached puberty and he became alarmed at what he perceived to be my unseemly lack of masculinity. Then it was all about woodworking projects, car repair, and so on, in a desperate attempt to butch me up, which made me feel like the turkey in the old Looney Tunes cartoon, who resists all attempts by the farmer to fatten him for slaughter.

I found myself suddenly engaged in activities that felt alien and arbitrary, Kafkaesque encounters with suburban absurdity. Hours in a dank basement sorting screws by type and size, "weeding" a remote part of the backyard that no one had ever paid attention to, the elaborate construction of a fence to separate our yard from the neighbor's, despite the presence of hedgelike flora that already served that purpose. This, I realized, is what men do on their weekends. After these sweaty afternoons he'd hand me a bar of Lava soap and slap me on the shoulder, probably figuring I was one step closer to being brought back from the brink of sexual degeneracy.

He'd make me wash the family car as he stood at the living room window and watched, beer in hand. I was self-conscious in the glare of his scrutiny, my movements suddenly struck me as effeminate and all wrong. I liked to rinse, I enjoyed the various kinds of sound the water made on different surfaces, so I'd turn the hose on different parts of the car regardless of whether they needed further rinsing or not. The hubcaps were best (that tinny sound like hail), so I concentrated on those and left huge parts of the car soapy. He'd come out raging, grabbing the green hose from my hand, send me inside in disgust. I'd peek out from my bedroom upstairs. The car seemed happy enough, under the benevolent gaze of an affable moron.