Johnny Tells All

I was fourteen. We were at my uncle's cookout and someone handed me tongs. I had never held tongs. I did not know what tongs were for. But every man at that cookout was holding tongs, and every man at that cookout looked like he belonged, so I grabbed them and I just... stood there. Near the grill. For four hours. I didn't cook anything. I didn't know how to cook anything. But I stood there with the confidence of a man who had been grilling his entire life, and nobody questioned it. That was the moment I realized: if you hold the right prop with enough confidence, nobody asks if you know what you're doing.

It was me and three guys at a bar in 2019. We were all doing the same thing — performing. One guy was watching football he didn't care about. Another was drinking a beer he didn't like. I was doing the head nod to strangers even though we were inside and it was weird. And somebody said, 'we should teach a class on this.' We laughed. Then we didn't laugh. Then we booked a conference room at a Holiday Inn and forty-seven people showed up. Forty-seven. We thought it'd be us and maybe our moms. Forty-seven strangers walked in, sat down, and when I said 'how many of you have practiced the head nod in a mirror,' every single hand went up. Every one. That's when I knew this wasn't a joke. This was a need.

Everyone gets the headline: fourteen 'no homos' in one dinner. But nobody talks about the first five minutes, when everything was fine. We were having a great dinner. The breadsticks were warm. The wine was decent. And our waiter had these... forearms. I'm not going to pretend I didn't notice. I noticed. And normally I'd file that away and move on, but I was three glasses of Chianti deep and my filter went to sleep before I did. I said 'you have incredible forearms' the way you might say 'nice weather.' Casually. Like it was nothing. But the table heard it and the table went quiet and I could feel every straight-acting reflex in my body fire at once. 'No homo' was the emergency protocol. And once I started, I couldn't stop. The wine was gorgeous — no homo. The tablecloth was stunning — no homo. By dessert I'd said it so many times the waiter was mouthing it along with me.

It looks like waking up and checking the sports scores before you check anything else, not because you care, but because someone at work is going to ask. It looks like listening to Joe Rogan podcasts at the gym — not listening, just playing them, so the algorithm thinks you're a certain kind of person. It looks like ordering the steak medium-rare because that's what men order, even though you actually prefer a really well-made risotto but you can't say the word 'risotto' with the right inflection without it sounding like you've been to Italy. Which I have. I went to Italy. I loved Italy. I told everyone I went for the 'history' but I went for the food and the architecture and one specific ceramics shop in Positano that I think about more than I should. You can't say any of that at the Monday morning meeting.

I spent eleven months building the perfect listening profile. I had a system. Zach Bryan in the morning. Country at every cookout — I'd connect to the speaker before anyone else so my profile would be the one playing. Joe Rogan at the gym, on loop, not listening but racking up the hours. I thought I'd cracked it. Then December hit and Spotify Wrapped said my number one genre was 'Hyperpop' and my most-played song was a Charli XCX deep cut I'd listened to three hundred and forty-seven times. Three hundred and forty-seven. I didn't even know I'd listened to it that many times. I thought I was being careful. But apparently I'd been falling asleep to it every night since March without realizing it counted. The song would play, I'd drift off, and Spotify would just... keep counting. Eleven months of camouflage, undone by one song and a sleep habit.

I needed something that sounded like a guy who drives a truck through mud on purpose. 'Chuck' is strong. 'Steak' is grilling-adjacent. '42' is just a number but it sounds like a jersey number, which is sports, which is safe. I workshopped it for about fifteen minutes, which is fourteen minutes longer than a straight man would spend choosing a username. But ChuckSteak42 has been bulletproof. Nobody has ever questioned ChuckSteak42. He listens to hunting podcasts and classic rock and one very long Joe Rogan episode about elk meat that has been playing on repeat for three months. He is the most boring man on Spotify and I am very proud of him.

The first time was genuinely an accident. My roommate left it on. I walked in during the warehouse scene and I sat down because... the choreography. I know that's the wrong word. I know choreography is the word that flags you. But it was genuinely impressive choreography and I sat there for two hours having opinions about dance that I have never shared with another human being. The second time I told myself I was studying masculine confidence. The third time was background noise. By the fourth time I'd stopped making excuses. I own the Blu-ray. It's behind The Godfather. When anyone asks my favorite movie I say Goodfellas. I have never seen Goodfellas. Not once. I have built an entire cinematic identity around a film I've never watched to provide cover for a film I've watched six times. If someone ever asks me about the scene at the end of Goodfellas, my entire life collapses.

I really wish you hadn't asked about Brad.

No, I'll tell it. Three beers. Happy hour. Amber lighting — and that's important, because the lighting was doing this thing where it made everyone look... better. Warmer. And Brad was telling a story about his weekend and he paused, and in that pause I looked at him and what came out of my mouth was: 'You have really beautiful eyes.' Which is not a thing men say to other men at a corporate happy hour. The table went quiet. Brad blinked. I blinked. And then I said the worst possible thing, which was: 'My mom always says that about people with blue eyes.' Brad's eyes are brown. He told me his eyes are brown. And I said — and I have replayed this in my head every single day since — I said: 'Yeah, that's what makes it special.' I don't know what I meant. I still don't know what I meant. I excused myself to the bathroom for twelve minutes and when I came back I started talking about the NFL draft at a volume that was probably inappropriate for an indoor setting.

Every day. Every single day I think about what it would be like to just say the risotto is better than the steak. To play Charli XCX on the main speaker. To tell Brad... I don't know what I'd tell Brad. Something honest. Something that doesn't involve his mother. But here's the thing nobody talks about: the performance isn't just hiding. It's also connecting. Every guy at that convention — every single one — showed up because they're performing too. And when you put two hundred men in a room and they all admit they're performing, something changes. The performance becomes the thing you share instead of the thing that isolates you. I'm not ready to stop. But I'm closer than I was. I hummed 'Popular' in the hotel lobby last week and I didn't stop when someone walked by. That's new. That's progress. The cargo shorts are staying, though. The cargo shorts are non-negotiable.