Kelly Poe Wilson

I’ve always had a certain amount of admiration for people who can, despite all logical evidence to the contrary, deny the obvious. The flat-earthers who insist that the pictures of a very rotund Earth have all been faked by NASA; the 1980’s record industry reps who blandly kept repeating that Boy George was a heterosexual; even the Bushites who still believe that weapons of mass destruction did, in, fact, exist in Iraq (even though it is now painfully obvious that, if Iraq had actually possessed any WMDs, they would have had to have been small enough to be featured as the newest tool on the Ronco Pocket Fisherman).

Yes, the stalwart Kennedy/CIA conspiracy theorists, crop circle fanatics and Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie spokespeople have always impressed me with, if not exactly their intelligence, then their dedication. It takes real gumption and fortitude to hold on to your beliefs long after they have been disproved, and while I wouldn’t want those same people performing brain surgery on me, it is still a comfort to know that such simple, uncomplicated souls exist.

Or, at least that’s what I thought until one of them came to live in the same house with me.

When it comes to denying the obvious, my daughter Clementine is second to none. Next to her, the former Iraqi Minister of Information looks like an amateur, and Johnnie Cochrane looks like a beginner. Need someone to stand in front a hundred microphones and claim Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown are in the throes of wedded bliss? Clementine’s your girl.

I first knew that she was going to be a pro at denial when she early on perfected the quintessential sibling cry of: I didn’t do it! (I know: lots of kids can say this with a straight face, but how many of them can, like Clementine, say it convincingly in the two seconds before their younger sibling starts to cry?)

After that coup she then went on to perfect the art of denial in the tough playing fields of the cookie cabinet: once she had successfully pulled off saying “no, I did not eat those cookies” as crumbs flew from her lips, she was ready for the big time, and could, without turning a hair, deny all knowledge of the Clementine tooth-sized bite marks on her brother’s arm.

In fact, it was after witnessing her push her brother off of the couch and then deny it so skillfully that even I began to doubt whether it had really happened that I started to think that maybe she has a career in Hollywood ahead of her; not on the big screen, mind you, but in front of the press microphones. Suddenly, I could see the future, and from where I sit it now seems inevitable that Clementine will someday end up as a Hollywood PR flak; how I dread the prospect of one day turning on the TV in 2025 just in time to catch Clementine earnestly announcing to the world that Robert Downey, jr. has just completed his 112th (and most successful!) stint in rehab.

As you can imagine, this was a rather depressing thought, or at least it was until I considered the alternative: what if, instead of making a career out of denial, she decides to make it a lifestyle? In that case, the best I would have to look forward to is one day seeing her stand in front of the school board with a time line in one hand and a picture of Noah’s Ark in the other, gamely trying to provide scientific evidence for something called “intelligent design”. Yikes–when you look at it that way, even Robert Downey, jr. starts to look good.

Logging on to MSN the other day, I couldn’t help but noticing the headline blaring across the top of the page: “Is Yelling Worse Than Hitting?” My response was immediate and visceral: God, I hope so– there’s no way I could hit as hard as I can yell. It was with a bit of trepidation, therefore, that I finally clicked onto the link; once there I saw, to my immense relief, that I needn’t have worried at all: the article did indeed go on to say that, yes, yelling was much worse than spanking. It then, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, went on to suggest several ways that parents could avoid yelling, my favorite two being 1) Try not to be around stressful people and situations (like, perhaps, your children?), and 2) Retreat to a quiet room and light a soothing candle whenever the urge to yell overtakes you. ( Since the urge to yell usually overtakes me when one of my children is chasing the other one around the living room with a steak knife, suggestion #2 would probably not be the wisest move in my household, and in fact would undoubtably lead to a spate of articles with headlines like: “Are Puncture Wounds Worse Than Mental Scars?”)

When did yelling get such a bad rap, anyway? As far as I’m concerned, yelling has it all over spanking. For one thing, with yelling you don’t even have to be within arm’s reach to be effective; on the contrary, the farther away the yell-ee is from the yell-or, the more effective it seems to be. (Nothing says I’m serious like a reprimand delivered from two houses away.) And then there’s the fact that yelling gives you a much broader range of nuances to choose from: from the casual stop riding on the dog yell, to the more strident stop peeing on the dog yell, all the way up to the frantic don’t put that in your mouth–it came out of the dog yell.

In fact, one of the best things about yelling is that you don’t even have to raise your voice to do it: every child knows that the most frightening yell is the silent one, the one your mother mouths to you as she is on the phone, the one you can’t quite make out but looks something like just you wait.

Of course, to give the authors of the MSN article credit, I’m sure that there are plenty of houses where the parents don’t really yell, just like I am sure that there are plenty of houses where they never watch anything but educational TV, never eat any food that is not triple-certified organic, and never make any decisions without first holding a family meeting. And I’m sure that these families are very, very happy; even if it is in a Stepford kind of way. My question for them, though, is this: what happens when all those poor un-yelled at children finally go and live in the real world? How do they deal with their first boss, their first room-mate–even their first spouse? Do they just dissolve into a puddle at the first raised decibel, or what?

At least with my children, I know that whatever unreasonable boss, psycho room-mate, or Jerry Springer spouse the world throws at them, they’ll be O.K. Even now, at the tender ages of four and eight, they could probably already go to a PETA convention wearing full-length fur coats and emerge completely unscathed. Heck, they could probably wear a PETA t-shirts to a cockfight and be none the worse for wear. Now, if only I could find a way to make them immune to siblings and steak knives, they’d be set for life.

Of all my father’s wives, my favorite (except, of course, for my mother), was Josephine. It wasn’t really anything that Josephine did when she was married to my father that made her stand out in my mind, but rather what she did when she left. You see, Josephine, in a marvel of stealth planning that the Bush administration could learn a few things from, took everything with her when she left. Everything. Somehow, between the time my father left for work in the morning and the time he came home at night, Josephine managed to remove every single item from their townhouse; unless it was something that unequivocally belonged to my father (like his socks), she took it with her.

She took the toothpaste from the bathroom. She took the ice trays from the freezer (but left the ice–the water bill must have been in his name). She took the food from the refrigerator, the light bulbs from their sockets, the toilet paper from the spindle, and the hangers from the closet. The few things she didn’t take, like his clothes and the trayless ice cubes, she left where they lie: shirts and pants in the bottom of the closet, underwear (still folded) in the spot where the dresser once stood. It was, in the words of my older sister, who visited not long after it happened, as if everything there had been beamed up by aliens, or vaporized in some kind of Josephine-erasing bomb.

We never saw Josephine again. I was only four or five at the time, but I remember that it seemed to me that Josephine had finally completed the disappearance cycle started by all the other wives: first disappearing from our sight, and then, with the help of a pair of sharp scissors and my grandmother’s determined hands, snip by snip disappearing from all the photos, until finally, because we were not to speak of them, disappearing from our collective memory altogether. In her leaving, Josephine did nothing more than the others had; she just did it in double time. And with panache.

Although it’s been over thirty years since I last saw Josephine, she is, these days, often on my mind; not because I’m thinking of pulling a stunt like hers (I think it would be much more efficient–and easier on my back–to simply throw my husband’s clothes, and his ice cubes, on the front lawn), but because, somehow, even though they bear no blood relation to her, my children have inherited Josephine’s talent with disappearance.

Or rather, they almost have. Perhaps because they are younger, and more inexperienced than Josephine was, they have not quite perfected the art of disappearing. What they now do–instead of a complete fade– is, in Harry Potter lingo, “splinch themselves”–that is, in the act of disappearing, they leave something of themselves behind.

Often what they leave is tiny, like the blueberries on the kitchen floor that were previously infesting their objectionable breakfast bagels. Other times the objects are larger, like the shoes and socks that mark their recent presence in the entryway. Sometimes, even, the objects are quite large, like the bicycles and scooters that lie in the driveway, their wheels still spinning eerily.

One thing, though: what they lack in their ability to completely disappear, they more than make up for with their speed: whereas Josephine’s disappearance took all day, Clementine and Clyde can be gone before I’ve had time to say : “Don’t forget to put away your…”

With practice, of course, I’m sure that one day they will achieve Josephine’s level of mastery, but until then I guess I’ll have to be content to gaze upon their “splinched” leavings. At least–for now–that means I don’t have to worry about naked ice cubes in the freezer.

When I was pregnant, the biggest mistake I ever made was not, as some may think, the weekly “family-size” package of Oreos, but rather reading all of those peppy advice books. This fact was most recently brought home to me during a downtown window-shopping expedition with my 8-year-old daughter, Clementine. We were looking at the displays in Black Hound Gallerie when I saw Clementine read something silently to herself; after a split second’s pause, she turned to me and asked: “Mom, what’s a pervert?” Here it was: the moment that all those advice books always referred to as a “teachable moment”; where I, as the parent, was supposed to deny my natural squeamishness and instead make myself available for questioning.

The last time Clementine and I had such a “teachable moment” was the time I rented Love, Actually to watch with her over Christmas break and somehow forgot about all of the incredibly graphic (but funny) sex scenes. According to the teachable moment theorists, when two of the characters started to assume a position that even I didn’t know the name of, I was supposed to turn to Clementine and calmly ask her if she had any questions about what she was seeing onscreen.

What I did instead was jab frantically at the remote control for a full minute (before finally realizing it was the control for a stereo that stopped working two years ago), toss all the pillows off the couch in a futile search for the DVD remote, and then, as a final resort, throw myself bodily across the TV screen. That’s when I noticed that all that snappy British dialogue had put Clementine to sleep probably twenty minutes before.

Hopeful of another reprieve, I glanced over to Clementine to see if there was any chance of repeat somnolence; unfortunately, however, it seems that Clementine finds Black Hound much more stimulating than Hugh Grant: she was wide awake, and still waiting expectantly for her answer. I could also tell by the gleam in her eyes that, in all likelihood, she already had a pretty good idea of what a pervert was; she was just trying to see if I would deliver the goods or if I would come up with yet another pathetic lie (like the time I told her that it was against the law for people to go to Disneyland more than once every three years). This time, and to the surprise of both of us, I delivered; or at least I tried to, while still staying within the boundaries of extreme tolerance. (Heaven forbid I should pronounce as “perverted” the very thing her future husband–or wife–likes to do the most).

“Well,” I hedged, “a pervert, I guess, is someone who, ah, thinks about, you know, sex, more than the average person.” Regretting immediately that I had committed myself to anything so definite, I began to backpedal faster than a Supreme Court nominee.

“Not that there is an average–I mean, people have been arguing about that forever. Look at Lenny Bruce. Look at the whole concept of ‘prurient interest’.”

Suddenly, I realized that maybe this was a “teachable moment”; I began to talk about the definitions of obscenity; about anti-miscegenation laws and forced sterilizations; even about James Joyce’s Ulysses and Nabokov’s Lolita, until suddenly I noticed that my audience was no longer listening, and had, in fact, probably had not been listening since the word sex left my mouth five minutes before; instead, she was skipping down Aspen street, singing “I’m a pervert! I’m a pervert!” at the top of her lungs.

So much for teachable moments. Next time I don’t care what the books say: I’m going with the pathetic lie. I wonder if she would have believed me if I’d told her that a pervert was somebody from Pervertia?

It used to be that, when asked what kind of Superpower I would most like to possess I would say invisibility. (In this I think I am fairly typical: in national surveys, most women choose invisibility; men, on the other hand, pick flying. Sociologists would probably say something about this being because men tend to be more interested in strength than stealth, but I think that the explanation is even more simplistic than that: what woman wouldn’t, given the choice, never have to look at her own waistline again?)

Lately, however, I have decided that I would gladly give up both the ability to fly and to become invisible, if only for a chance at what must usually be considered the minorest of superpowers: the ability to project a cone of silence.

I can’t even remember who possessed this superpower originally; for a while I thought it was Superman, but then somebody pointed out that what he actually had was a Fortress of Solitude (equally appealing). Then I thought that it might be Aquaman before I remembered that, while he did have that cone thing, his was for talking to the fish (not so appealing) Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter who had the cone of silence, because, just like invisibility or flying, this is a superpower I am unlikely ever to possess, which is a shame, because I have been in dire need of it ever since my son, Clyde, turned four and really learned how to fight.

As a veteran parent with almost nine years’ time served, I thought I could handle any noise my children threw at me: non-stop whining for Happy meals, shrill, ear-piercing little girl screaming–even an Elmo movie being popped into the VCR at high volume on an early Sunday morning. With my special “la-la-la-can’t-hear-you” powers of extra strength denial I was invincible: crying jags that would cause my husband (and the neighbors) to consider emigration would barely cause me to glance up from my book long enough to smugly say, “Oh, does that noise bother you?”

Of course, like a Greek heroine mocking the power of the gods, I should have known that eventually I would be punished for my misplaced pride: in my case, punishment came in the form of a heaping helping of sibling rivalry.

Before Clyde turned four, I never gave sibling rivalry much thought: with nearly five year’s difference in my kids’ ages, I thought that Clementine would, with a few well-placed blows, quickly and brutally establish her supremacy right from the start. (In my defense, I’m sure the Russians thought much the same thing when they went into Afghanistan.)

What I failed to consider, however, is that with Clyde there can be no ultimate supremacy, because Clyde never quits. To put it another way: that boy sure can take a punch. Sure, he still dissolves into a hysterical, crying mess after each blow, but then he’s back for more. And therein lies my problem.

It seems that the combination of Clementine’s shrieks of rage, Clyde’s cries of attack/retreat/attack, and the assorted calls from both demanding immediate punishment
of the other all triangulate perfectly to burst right through my protective “la-la-la” barrier. It’s like I’m a dog, and they finally found the right whistle.

My husband finds all this highly amusing–having grown up as one of seven combatants, he now finds that he is the one immune to our children’s “dulcet tones”. This, of course, is evidence of the gods at there most merciless; how else would you explain my husband glancing up smugly from his book in order to say to me: “Oh, does that noise bother you?”

I’ve always wondered if the little tics and habits you have as a child give any indication as to what kind of career you will have when you grow up. Take my stepfather, for example: from a young age he showed an unusual interest in both sweeping, and making recordings of people using the toilet; he grew up to be crazy. Ok, so that’s not such a good example; but maybe the five-year-old Thomas Edison drove his parents crazy with his inventions, and Mademoiselle Curie’s favorite toy was her junior chemistry set. Who knows, maybe even George Bush made a habit of invading neighboring kids’ yards and liberating their unusually large toy reserves.

The reason that I have such a strong interest in this is because of my son, Clyde, and his rather “interesting” personal habits. When he was younger these habits involved things like wiping his butt and blowing his nose with the same piece of toilet paper–in that order. Naturally, this made me think that any future career he had would involve saying things like “would you like fries with that?” and “I’d like to tell you about a special offer from Dell”. Lately, however, he has begun to show talents of another sort, talents that I hope may lead him down an entirely different, albeit not quite as respectable, career path: lately I have begun to think that maybe he will grow up to be a fight promoter.

Everything he touches starts a fight. His silverware at dinnertime, the pair of socks he has been told to put on, even the worms he finds when I am planting in the yard. Nothing is safe from his Don King-like machinations; when it comes to organizing a throw down he is Tina Turner in Beyond the Thunderdome, except he doesn’t have that creepy little guy following him around saying, “Who rules Bartertown?”

With Clyde, though, it’s not just the fights, but the nature of the fights that makes me think he has a future in the sports world: like all the best fight promoters, Clyde knows that there is more to orchestrating a fight than throwing a couple of combatants into a ring: instinctively he seems to understand that the best fights involve not just man against man (or, in Clyde’s case, fork against spoon), but are actually little Morality plays where Good can finally triumph over Evil. That’s why, in Clyde’s rumbles, the potato masher (Good) always wins out over the ice cream scoop (Evil), and even the lowly (but still Good) butter knife can carry the day against the supremely Evil corkscrew.

Of course, the thing that really makes me think that Clyde will grow up to be a fight promoter, and not just a fight instigator, are his audiences. Who can forget the big showdown between the slotted serving spoon (Good) and the melon-baller (Evil)? Certainly not all the soupspoons and teaspoons, who turned out en masse to cheer their brethren on. (And certainly not the rest of us, who ate our cereal with forks for weeks afterwards).

You’d think, with Clyde’s career path seemingly laid out before him, that I’d be entirely sold on the idea that the things you are interested in when you are young will determine what you will become when you grow up–but actually, I’m not. I can’t be, because that would mean my daughter, Clementine, whose favorite hobby is cutting out little tiny pieces of paper and leaving them in piles all over the house, will someday grow up to be a performance artist. Or crazy. I have to say that, of the two, I’m hoping for the latter.

Way back when I had a disposable income (back before my children disposed of it completely), I was a frequent customer at our local comic book store, where I could pick up the latest issues of “Reed Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman”; “Sandman”; and, my personal favorite, “Hellblazer” (don’t even talk to me about Keanu Reeves’ recent bastardization of one of the greatest comic book characters of all time, John Considine.).

My husband also bought comic books; however, his tastes were almost wholly different from mine: whereas I liked “Hate”, he like “Wolverine” and “The Punisher”–a type of comic I could never abide. It wasn’t that they were too violent (nothing’s’s more violent than Reed Fleming), and it wasn’t that they were too dark (the cheeriest character in “Sandman” is his sister, Death); it was just that, inevitably, at some point in the story, there would always seem to be the cheesy grunted out Superhero soliloquy.

“Must…get…out…of…here,” the hero would gasp to no one in particular, as the last of his ebbing strength faded away during yet another cliffhanger ending. (Be sure to rush out and buy the next issue kids, and get two–one to read, and one to keep “mint”).

“How cornball can you get?” I would think. “That is so unrealistic.” (Unlike the story of a man who goes to hell and fights the devil, but still.)

And then I had children, and both the Superhero bits and fighting the devil seemed so much more real.

Until I had seen an 8-year-old attempting to put dirty clothes in the laundry basket, I had no idea that people really do react like dying Superheroes when they find that, for whatever reason, their strength has suddenly deserted them. Anyone watching my daughter, Clementine, trying to carry a dirty sock across the entire length of the living room would think that the sock in question was a actually filled with Kryptonite, so frequently is she forced to lay it down and walk away from it for a “rest”. (Come to think of it, I wonder why Lex Luther never thought of placing a dirty, Kryptonite filled sock in Superman’s living room; although it was probably because Superman would have never noticed it: Super or not, he was still a man.)

As a matter of fact, it was witnessing Clementine’s epic struggle with the aforementioned sock that led me to believe that “Superheroism” might be the root of her problem Suddenly it all made sense: not only is she a Superhero in disguise, but dirty sock’s are her alter ego’s Achilles’ heel.

Unfortunately, though, for Clementine’s future as a Superhero, it’s not just socks that have this effect on her, but also dirty dishes, scraps of paper, and grocery bags. It would seem that none of these items can be carried for more than three yards before they must be set down and abandoned.

One time we were walking home and I asked her to carry my hat. When we got home and I asked her for it, she looked at me as if I had lost my mind. “I set it down somewhere, “she said, clearly bemused that I had forgotten about her “Super Weakness.” This, in fact, was the very incident that finally convinced me that my husband’s Superhero comics had had the characterization right all along,: not because I got to see a real live Superhero, complete with Super Weakness, but because I finally witnessed the Archvillian dancing an impotent jig of rage at being thwarted by the Hero once again: it was me.

If what I have read is true, and in Aztec culture, a woman who died during childbirth was afforded the same rituals and respect as was a warrior who had died in battle, then what, I wonder, did they consider the mother of a toddler to be–a P.O.W.?

Granted, the mother of a three-year-old doesn’t have to endure quite the same hardships, as, say, someone like John McCain did; they’re not stuck in a hole somewhere in the middle of the jungle being poked at with sticks by people who not only hate them, but make unintelligible demands, but it sure is close. Change “hole” to “minivan” and “jungle” to “suburbs”, and you’ve pretty much summed up the experience of living with a toddler. (Come to think of it, most of the mothers I know would be delighted to be given their very own private–or even semi-private–hole.)

And then, of course, there is the whole brain-washing thing. While it is true that we don’t have to hear such things as “Uncle Sam is the Great Satan,” and watch an unending stream of propaganda films, we do have to hear phrases like: “Elmo loves you” and watch a never-ending loop of Powerpuff Girls DVDs. (Given a choice, I think I prefer the former).

And yet, even with all this overwhelming evidence of a clear link between motherhood and enforced captivity, I would be willing to bet that the Aztecs still didn’t see it as a task on par with the acts of the their bravest warriors; although, neither, for that matter, do most modern types, even the ones who are about to become parents themselves. Of course, this is probably because, like the Aztecs, the scariest thing most parents-to-be can envision is the actual birth itself, which is unfortunate, because the birth is quite possibly the only time in your entire child-rearing career where complete strangers will not only offer to help you, but will try to give you drugs to make the process go smoother. (My advice: ask if you can get your drugs “to go”; trust me: there are things that will come up in the next few years that will require much more medicating to recover from then a little thing like childbirth—the first time you change a diaper in a train bathroom just as the train starts to go around a really sharp turn, for example.)

The other argument in favor of the relative ease of the birth process when compared to the mothering process is that, while they’re in the birth canal, at least you can still be sure of not only where they are, but what they’re up to. At least you can still be sure that they are not, at that very moment, creating a mural of Diego Riviera-like proportions in the bathroom, that, by virtue of its having been constructed entirely of “man-made” materials, will turn out to be so foul that were it to be hung in a public gallery your local senator would immediately set to work slashing federal funding for public art.

Coming back to the POW argument, though: maybe for the Aztecs it was different; maybe since their mothers didn’t have to deal with things like T-ball, juice boxes and car seats, they didn’t suffer from the same stresses that those of today do, and therefore were not really entitled to the respect of a captured combatant. Somehow, I doubt it: after all, it was the Aztecs who practiced both blood sacrifice and ritualized chocolate drinking; you can’t tell me that people like that didn’t know a thing or two about the stresses of living with a three-year-old.

When my first child was born, I was by no means impartial when it came to preferring one sex over the other: I wanted a girl. I know that some people say things like, “Well, I don’t care, as long as it’s healthy,” and I guess I believe them, but as for me, the only thing I cared about was getting a girl. Girls were all I knew. My only sibling was a sister. My mother’s only sibling was also a sister, who, in turn, had two girls (my only cousins). The idea of a boy was so off-putting to me that, after what I considered a difficult labor ( my midwives, however, informed me that it was normal—easy, even), I was so emotionally drained I was sure that I had just delivered a boy: what else could have caused such grief?

But, in fact, I had had a daughter: Clementine. Clementine was nearly five years old by the time I had my second child, and in the intervening years I had seen enough other children to know that it wasn’t as simple as girls=good, boys=bad. And yet, when people asked me what I was hoping for, I was just as insistent as I had been the first time, maybe even more: I wanted a girl. Of course, what I got, was my son, Clyde.

And I was ok with that. Really. (Well, as ok as anybody can ever be to know that the male population of her house has just doubled. As a friend of mine put it: until she had to share a house with boys, she thought that “cleaning the base of toilet” just meant giving it a light dusting every few months). But no, really, after Clyde was born I adjusted very well to the idea of having another boy in the house. I was ready for the whole t-ball playing thing, the sports-watching thing, the making a gun out of every little thing, thing. I was ready for a boy; what I got, however, was much better than a boy: I got a guy.

Guys are like boys, only to the tenth power. Boys pee standing up. Guys write their names in the snow. Boys play organized sports. Guys invent their own sports with objectives like seeing who can take the hardest punch without blacking out. Boys go out for a few beers. Guys play drinking games with rules like “the first one to throw up has to buy the next round.” Boys will make fool of themselves trying to get the girl; guys will make fools of themselves as well, but without ever realizing there was even a girl in the room (and so will, consequently, get the girl anyway).

I first suspected Clyde was a guy when I signed him up for ice skating lessons, and his favorite part was making fun of the other kids when they fell down. Sometimes he would even fall down himself, he would be laughing so hard at his fellow three year-olds laid out on the ice. When this happened, of course, no matter how hard he would hit the ice himself, he would laugh even harder. What else would you expect? He’s all guy.

It seems to me, in my admittably limited experience, that most boys grow up to be men who go on to do big, important things like creating Enron, the European Union and Viagra. Guys, on the other hand, generally grow up to be, well, guys. They also create big, inportant things like the X Games, Las Vegas and whippets. As far as I can tell, no guy has ever gone on to become the president of the United States, or even the CEO of a big corporation. Clearly, what the world needs now, is a whole lot more guys.

I first suspected Clyde was a guy when I signed him up for ice skating lessons, and his favorite part was making fun of the other kids when they fell down. Sometimes he would even fall down himself, he would be laughing so hard at his fellow three year-olds laid out on the ice. When this happened, of course, no matter how hard he would hit the ice himself, he would laugh even harder. What else would you expect? He’s all guy.