Man Can

Almost a throttle, this grip around a beer can.

Your fingers and thumb stretch to meet, as though cupped under a rifle barrel or clasped around the creamy upper arm of a spinster who still sets a gardenia in her hair. And cold, too. The blood in your palm chills in sympathy with the beer inside it; a surge of frosty heat crackles up your forearm; little weeps of sweat pimple the can like bunched stars. Though taut, the aluminum gives, just enough, as your finger slides under the tab and your nail scrapes off a thin dust of metal and anticipation.

The tab-tug varies. Some men yank on it as though it were the starter cord of an old crotchety lawn mower. The tab bends a full 180 degrees or, at times, rips off altogether and so mimics the pull-tabs ripped off cans from yesteryear, when burley mechanics with nametags of “Berger” or “A.J.” would fling tie-shaped slivers of metal into the corners of garages or at the bare feet of children. Other men tug gingerly, testing the degree of can-opening force they need before giving it. I’m a tester. I cruelly toy with the tab, there, at the cusp, just before the crack of no going back, when the can still has a will of its own. O rec-room memory of Jenny Buttersmith’s Gordian bra clasp! O after-prom flashback to Gigi Bevell’s lock-jawed Jordace zipper!

The soul can withstand only so much. At last, with a spasmodic tug, the can cracks: spurt of mist, scent of hops, desire slaking, slaking, and, can somehow empty, somehow crushed and gnarled and flung at the television, slaked.

Call it man. Call it can. Call it man can.

My manhood recently returned to me because of a beer brewed in Longmont, Colorado, near the manly peaks of the Rocky Mountains. Dale’s Pale Ale has a brash, hoppy smack. It curls in the mouth with the upward rush of a wave at Big Sur, roiling off the tongue and cresting the palate before crashing near the tongue-tip in a malty metallic foam. In color, it’s fire-struck amber. It’s good, good as the pick up on a mint-condition 1967 Shelby Mustang GT500 or a threesome with Lady Gaga and a Texas steak.

Yet, as an artisanal beer found in effete specialty shops and post-hippy Whole Foods Markets, Dale’s Pale Ale should not churn the gonads, not in the manner of Bud, Pabst, Busch, Labatt, or any of those grunt-able beers. Dale’s Pale Ale should be eunuch a beer.

But it comes in a can, a crush-it, kill-it, destroy-it can, a can trumpeting the gaudy red, white, and blue of Old Glory before a cavalry charge, a man can.

And because of this can, I realized that for years I’d been in the thrall of the bottle. Beers brewed in small batches, beers with rarefied ingredients or resulting from exotic brewing practices, beers requiring their own glassware and optimal serving temperatures, these were the beers I’d been quaffing, and these beers, almost universally, came in bottles. They were expensive, exclusive; they lined the shelves of fancy liquor stores like elegant vibrators or haute couture gowns, their labels as stunning and singular as the beer within them. Bottles attract artisan brewers because bottles supposedly preserve a beer’s flavor better than plastic-lined aluminum cans, and I was attracted to artisan brews.

Moreover, as I gazed across the contemporary American beer-scape, I saw that the bottle also dominated us collectively. From subway ads to faded billboards, on multi-million-dollar Super Bowl spots and in biker bars, I saw bottles, raised high in the hands of money brokers and snowboarders or slathered with ice and splashed in steel buckets, bottles and more bottles, brown, green, clear, and imperious, whether choked with limes or crushed against the implants of peroxide blondes. The Buds, Pabsts, Buschs, and Labatts, they were now promoting their beer in bottles. The bottle, it seemed, was ascendant.

A look at the beer-drinking data backed up my impression. In 1998, American breweries shipped 17.67 billion bottles. By 2008, that number had climbed to 20.25 billion. Cans, however, had held relatively steady. In 1998, breweries shipped 33.4 billion cans and in 2008 that number was 33.3 billion, with the biggest fluctuation in 2005 with a drop to 31.5 billion. (I’m getting these stats from the Beer Institute, a lobbying group for the beer industry, which in turn got them from the Can Manufacturers Institute, a lobbying group for the can industry, and the U.S Census Bureau.) Overall, Americans drink more beer from cans than bottles, but Americans are also drinking more beer overall, and we want our all of our additional 2.58 billion beers served to us in bottles.

Symbolically, the country had become uncanned and — to the extent that the can upholds a beery vision of American manhood — unmanned. We needed a hero. Some one, some man, had to do something pro-can.

At 39, I Shotgun a Beer

As with most totemic objects, the can has rituals. Collecting, stacking, smashing, and tossing make for a few, but perhaps the most manly of them all is shotgunning.

Indigenous to frat houses and hunting blinds, the shotgun involves several steps:

1) Lay the can on its side
2) Punch hole at the bottom of can
3) Place mouth over hole, avoiding any jagged edges created in Step 2
4) Cue drinking buddies to yell, “Shotgun!”
5) In a swift, testosterone-infused motion, raise can and
6) Pull tab, thereby releasing a vigorous downward flow of beer
7) Drink/drain/down said beer until said flow stops from said can
8) Belch (Optional)

Step 7 is the extreme step, when you and the can are lip-locked in the drinking equivalent of a death hold and you can’t stop guzzling until the can is empty without the risk of what the shotgun cognoscenti call a “beer facial.” I was ready. I asked my wife for help.

“I need a knife,” I said, thundering into the kitchen.

My wife must have noticed my manly demeanor, for she went right to searching.

“Let me see,” she hummed, rummaging through the utensils drawer, while I laid the soon-to-be-impaled can on the counter. Bright faced, she produced a chopstick.

“A knife,” I repeated, “a manly knife.”

“Well, we have this little paring knife,” she frowned, waggling its stub of a blade in the air. “I think it’s our most manly knife.”

A paring knife? I needed another implement, a key maybe, or a rusty nail ripped from the wall with my teeth. Then my wife recalled the pocket knife my grandfather had given me decades ago. With a locking blade and a soaring eagle engraved on the handle, it was ideal. Unfortunately, it was also covered in yucky glue from all the packages that my wife had opened with it after her online shoe-shopping. I had to scrub it for a while to get the blade sufficiently hygienic to stab the can.

“Aren’t you going to wash the can, too?” my wife asked. She fears germs.

“No,” I said, rinsing the suds off my hands. I wasn’t as concerned about the unmanly nature of scrubbing a beer can with Seventh Generation Natural Dish Liquid as I was about the vague feeling that what I was about to do was, when I thought about it, stupid. And, worse, what if I flubbed it? What if I couldn’t do what alcohol-impaired fullbacks could? I had to start.

Knife wet, I plunged the blade into the can, with more vigor than I needed. I felt its tip tunk against the counter. The beer didn’t so much as fizz.

“You’re just going to drink it out of there?” My wife looked more perplexed than worried.

I was. I already was. I had grabbed the can and lifted it to my lips, cracking it open an instant too soon. Beer splashed out of the can onto my mouth and chin, but I persevered. I clamped onto the hole and guzzled blindly, by which I mean eyes closed. My wife tells me the shotgunning happened quickly (“Just a few seconds”), but I distinctly remember a sticky dribble inching off my chin and down my chest, halting only when it reached the waistband of my boxers. I also remember dropping and backing away from the can as though it were a feral skunk. My wife, however, insists that I fired down the can, puffed up my pecs, and gave her a “scary hard” high-five as I burped sonorously. I think she says this to comfort me, and it does.

Whatever the truth of it, I am sure that the shotgunning aftermath involved me pacing up and down our narrow hallway, trying not to retch, as a can’s worth of carbonation rioted in my stomach. I am also sure that, no matter how questionable my shotgun, vomiting right afterwards would count as unmanly.

So I fought it, fought it and won. Not for me, but for America.

I am getting a beer gut.

Ovoid curves, soft as baby toes, push outward where I once had a waist, and my navel is deepening like some new orifice. I see the change, after a shower or when I break out my old shorts on a hot Tuesday: There, in the mirror, I spot the budding physique of a pro bowler. And I’m having to hitch up my pants. My belly pushes them down, which means that at parties or ambling through Riverside Park, I find myself jerking on my belt loops, against gravity, as though trying to heft my buttocks through my armpits. Suspenders seem inevitable.

Decades ago, as an underage drinker, I would have repulsed me. I remember staring at those gelatinous, barrel-sized men cradling tall boys and wondering how they got like that. What happened? Why would they let themselves go and, worse, why didn’t they stop themselves once they saw they were going? With teenage hauteur and metabolism, I was baffled.

Now, I’m going. I could blame it on the ease and excess of beer drinking that cans enable, that cans come cheaply and in packs and that a keg is essentially one big can, but I suspect my gut has more in common with the way dog owners and their dogs, through some profound and primal connection, look alike. For I am a man slowly turning into the shape of a can, a can man.

Yet even if that’s true, even if I’m becoming what I’m consuming, I’d like to believe that, at times, I’m also enabled in the best sense. I’d like to believe that on those ugly nights, when the emptiness and loneliness and pointlessness that comes with being a man in America presses in, nights when you say, to no one in particular or your corn nuts, “I can’t,” that on those nights, nights that arrive as surely as age and adipose tissue, you might find a brief reprieve, a counter-voice, a comfort, however cold, in cracking open a beer: man can.