Who Says ‘Regular Guys’ Don’t Like Cocktails and Tennis?

I suppose most men think of themselves as regular guys. In “Are You a Regular Guy? A Guide to Being a Man in the 1990s,” regular guy Lee Stratton attempts in 156 pages to define that condition.

The regular guy, he suggests, is a hard-working stay-at-home who likes to watch football on TV, drink beer, tinker with his car, eat steaks, read the sports page and watch John Wayne movies, and he doesn’t want his daughter to have her ears pierced.

His wife does all the cooking and most of the chores.

He doesn’t like tennis, ballet or cocktail parties. (That lets me out. In one recent week I went to two ballet performances at the Music Center, attended a cocktail-dinner party in the Exposition Park Rose Garden and spent every afternoon watching the Wimbledon tennis matches on TV.)

More specifically, the regular guy’s idea of literature is the sports section; he thinks kiwi is a brand of shoe polish, and he thinks Ivan Boesky may have played third base for the Dodgers.

Altogether the regular guy emerges as rather a slob, he has some virtues: He works hard, he’s friendly, and he loves his wife and kids, in his fashion. But he doesn’t take his wife to the ballet or concerts; he takes her to hockey games and tractor pulls.

It seems to me the regular guy has a few traits Stratton doesn’t mention. The regular guys I know are likely to harass women, cultivate potbellies and hang around noisy beer joints.

I have no doubt that the naval and Marine officers who abused women at that convention in Las Vegas thought of themselves as regular guys. What the heck, they were just funnin’.

I remember that once when I was in the Marine Corps I made a reference to BAMs, a derogatory acronym for women Marines; it was then in common use by male Marines. I was unfortunately overheard by a woman major, who turned on me fiercely.

I explained that in my lexicon BAM meant Beautiful American Marine. She was not mollified, but she didn’t put me on report.

I must confess that at that time I thought of myself as a regular guy. I would no longer use the term BAM for fear that it would be misunderstood, as it was by the major in that case.

Stratton’s regular guy is an easy-going, hard-working, macho-minded hunk whose idea of a sophisticated drink is a boilermaker (whiskey with a beer chaser).

“Today’s guy,” Stratton says, “doesn’t drink and drive. He has plenty of friends who will give him a lift if he ever needs it.”

That appears to be an attempt to clear up the regular guy’s image. The trouble is, most of a regular guy’s drinking friends would be regular guys too, and would very likely be just as drunk as he was.

Evidently Stratton thinks a regular guy is a good citizen, since he considers himself one and says he is 47, lives in a one-cop town with a Dairy Queen and a soda fountain; in high school he played in the marching band; he did a hitch in Vietnam and in 1976 went to work for the Columbus Dispatch as a reporter.

He refers to his wife of 19 years as “my first wife.” They have two sons, 14 and 8. They root for the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Cincinnati Reds. They have a 1979 Plymouth Horizon and a 1985 Plymouth Voyager that they bought used.

That’s a pretty regular guy. In fact, it sounds a lot like me. My wife and I have two sons; I have never referred to her as my first wife, but she is; we root for the Dodgers (I can’t relate to the Los Angeles (Oakland) Raiders or the Anaheim Rams); I used to drink boilermakers.

What happened to me? Why am I no longer a regular guy? I believe that gradually, degree by degree, my wife has refined me. She has inveigled me into going to the ballet, the opera and the Philharmonic and to plays at the Mark Taper Forum and the Doolittle Theater.

Almost every week we attend cocktail parties or dinners at which wine is served in long-stemmed glasses--something Stratton says no regular guy would tolerate.

We both have cars we bought new, though hers is 8 years old. They are both Japanese, something I think a regular guy would never buy. I never tinker with their engines and don’t even know where my tools are, if any.

But if I’m not a regular guy, what am I?

Good God! Don’t tell me I’m a member of Danny Quayle’s “cultural elite”!

Bartender, gimme a boilermaker, quick!