Guess What? Chickenbutt
a short essay on love
A few years ago Jenn and I went to a butterfly festival and while we were walking through the outdoor gardens we saw a guy wearing a “Guess What? Chickenbutt” T-shirt. The shirt threads were growing thin, and the forest green had faded to a color more akin to baby puke. The white lettering was peeling, as was the entire chicken, not just the butt. The guy wearing it was watching butterflies light on the lantana with his wife beside him, and as soon as I saw his shirt I started laughing.
“Love the shirt, buddy,” I said, catching his attention, thinking of the silly Guess what? Chickenbutt game that I sometimes still get Jenn with, causing her to question the decisions that led to us living together.
The guy was a few years younger than me, wearing shorts and a ballcap. It was summer, or getting close to it in Kansas, and he started smiling when he figured out what I was pointing at. He opened his mouth to say something, but before he could his wife said, in an exasperated voice, “Oh my God!” and rolled her eyes skyward, just like Jenn sometimes does. “Of course another man likes it!”
She looked to Jenn for pity or acknowledgement. “He wears it everywhere,” the woman said.
Upon hearing this I knew several things. The first was that she did not like the shirt. I also knew she had asked him on more than one occasion not to wear the shirt in public. Finally—and I don’t know how to explain this except that I saw this thought pass between them as clearly as if she had said it—she had asked him not to wear the shirt THAT MORNING.
This made me wonder if Jenn was thinking about the ratty sweatpants I slounge around the house in or the overtly Western shirt of mine she hates, but I’m not sure, because while she and the woman were commiserating on the awful choices the men in their lives make, me and the guy were laughing like 8th graders.
“She hates it,” he told me, nodding toward his wife, who was whispering to Jenn and casting her eyes at her husband, “but guys always find it funny.”
Which makes sense, though I didn’t say that. I didn’t want to tell him that it’s because we’re all little boys inside, laughing at chickenbutts, before the shadows of our fathers fall over us. Before we’re bullied on the bus and in the halls of high school. Before we’re turned hard and angry by the uglinesses around us, never quite knowing we’re all just trying to find our way home when so often we don’t even know where we’re going.
What breaks my heart these days is that there are men out there who have never allowed anyone close enough to call them equal. That some men feel the need to tower over everyone around them.
But there’s no need to go into all that. The point is Jenn and the woman recognized each other’s lives for a moment, and me and the guy did. And we all shared a moment in wondering how we get along with one another. How we love each other as madly and deeply as we do. Some nights now when I can’t sleep I wonder how any of us are worthy of love. I wonder how Jennifer loves me when she knows that inside me lives a little kid who still, at this advanced age, thinks chickenbutt is funny.
And though I don’t know why we love who we love, what signs and signals our secret hearts send out, it comforts me that there is a mystery to romance that man can’t map out. Besides, it makes me happy to see two people disagree and still love each other, even if they are absolutely and utterly embarrassed to be seen together.
Guess why? cow pie.
You know what’s funny? Jokes. You know what sucks? Vacuums. Oh my, we’ve been trading this (and chickenbutt) in my family (including my kids) for years. You guys are running the same script my wife and I run and we’ve been happily married for thirty five years. Nicely told Paul.