By COREY LEVITAN<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before our daughter, I had a tight-knit circle of about a dozen male friends. This was in Las Vegas, where my wife and I lived for 11 years. They were artists, casino executives, and other writers. We hosted parties for them and their significants at our\u00a0house\u00a0and attended\u00a0poker\u00a0nights at theirs. We went out to dinner after work, then drinking and gambling until early the next morning. Four of us who worked for the same newspaper even formed a band. We played classic rock covers at bars and weddings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
After our daughter, large chunks of that circle began breaking away. I promised my friends nothing would change, but their suspicions proved correct. But having someone in your house who can die at any given minute due to something the law would hold you accountable for, that\u2019s kind of a decadence-damper for me.\u00a0I love my daughter, and I love being a dad. And, frankly, I couldn\u2019t afford the $60 for a sitter, or the emotional penance for making the wife\u00a0babysit. Our band stopped playing gigs and only got together to rehearse every three or four months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last year, my wife and I relocated \u2014 not long after our daughter started applying her newfound reading skills to the hooker\u00a0billboards\u00a0that pulled up next to us on Las Vegas Boulevard (\u201cDaddy, what does \u2018Girls Straight to Your Room\u2019 mean?\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now we\u2019re in San Diego. We\u2019re all happier, but I\u2019m not in one important way. My broken friend\u2019s circle is now a nonexistent one. And, as a freelancer who works from home, no replacement circle has managed to materialize below the balcony I sit out on for seven hours a day until picking our daughter up from school. My wife tells me I can get away for one night a week to do some male bonding if I want. (\u201cPlease just get the eff out of my face already!\u201d is how she lovingly phrases it.) But, after more than a year, there\u2019s still not one guy within 300 miles I know well enough to grab a\u00a0beer\u00a0with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t need full-on keg-tapping,\u00a0football-watching, wife-complaining man-cave time. I don\u2019t even like football. I just need a dude to quote\u00a0Anchorman<\/em>\u00a0and talk about the stock market with, someone who will remind me of the me I was back when the only child depending on me was myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It turns out, we all need that. A 2014\u00a0study\u00a0conducted by Germany\u2019s University of Gottingen found that being surrounded by a group of other men helps us men relax, live longer, and feel less threatened by others. In fact, the study found it more relaxing than time spent with our wives and family. The study was conducted on macaque monkeys, not humans, but macaques have very similar social behaviors \u2014 especially to my Vegas friends Doug and Martin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the first six months in my new hometown, the only male friend I made was Nick, the clerk at the Shell station convenience store around the corner from our apartment building. And I only got to know him because one day I bought 44 energy drinks that were on sale and then the boxes broke and they rolled all over the floor. Picking the cans up was our meet-cute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One day, Sean the maintenance guy from our apartment building walked into the convenience store and started talking to Nick. All of a sudden, 100 percent of a building\u2019s occupants in my new hometown knew my name. I was Norm from Cheers<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few weeks later, however, Nick revealed something to me that crushed me like one of my energy drink cans:\u00a0His name wasn\u2019t Nick.\u00a0<\/em>It was Alex. I found this out after \u201cHey, Nick!\u201ding him for about the 100th<\/sup>\u00a0time. \u201cI tell people the wrong name sometimes,\u201d Alex finally admitted, \u201cin case they leave a bad Yelp review. Sorry man, it snowballed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dude, what else have you lied to me about?!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Desperate, I registered with a\u00a0stay-at-home dad\u00a0Meetup but unregistered as soon as I received my first email invite and thought about it. It\u2019s not that I see myself as superior to other lonely guys who stand around parks in name tags with their kids trying to seem cool and not desperate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Okay, it is<\/em> that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My wife works in a busy office and interacts with people all day long, so she started making new girlfriends right away. She dragged me along to meet a few of their husbands at work parties. But to them, I will always be their wife\u2019s friend\u2019s husband. And that\u2019s not a guy they can ever cut loose with or trust. That\u2019s a spy. That\u2019s the guy at the bachelor party whose report about what happened gets back to the bride.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe I\u2019m just playing hard-to-bond or something. But the only luck I\u2019ve had meeting potential BFFs is through the friends our daughter makes at school. Brian\u2019s daughter, Jenna, sits next to mine in first grade. We met each other at Jenna\u2019s birthday\u00a0party. Brian\u2019s a cycling obsessive who bikes 30 miles every day. So, I told him I did, too. I feel tremendous pressure to make it work with every new dad I meet this way, to prove that I\u2019m more than \u201cCorey (Skylar\u2019s dad)\u201d even though that\u2019s how they will always have me in their phone contacts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I felt bad about lying to Brian. But I just got the feeling that all he had room for in his life was a cycling partner and beggars can\u2019t be choosers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Immediately, I went home and scoured eBay for the first bicycle I\u2019d purchased since age 14. Which is how I discovered that ebikes were a thing that exists now, and that some look enough like regular bikes to, maybe, fool your first man-date. So I ordered one and painted over the portion of the frame that screamed: \u201cELECTRIC VEHICLE.\u201d (This was actually an easier lie to get away with than showing up in my current lack of cycling\u00a0fitness\u00a0and trying to pedal 20 mph alongside a man so insane that he maps out precise cycling routes on an app, including stretch breaks and the time it should take him to arrive at each mile marker.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fortunately, as extraordinary as Brian was at cycling, he was less extraordinary at detecting strange hums emanating from your rear wheel every time you\u00a0climb\u00a0a hill with him. He had\u00a0no idea<\/em>\u00a0I was motor-juicing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After about a month, I bumped into Brian on our regular trail but not at our regular time. I was training on my own at this point, too, improving so much that I almost never engaged the motor anymore. I was even thinking about trading in my ebike for a fully human-powered model. Only Brian wasn\u2019t alone. His 8-year-old son was biking with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCool electric bike!\u201d the kid yelled at me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It wasn\u2019t that I was lazy and didn\u2019t want to work out, I tried explaining. It was because \u2013 let\u2019s see, how did they put it in the ebike listing? \u2014 I prefer\u00a0options.<\/em>\u00a0The words coming out of Brian\u2019s mouth claimed it wasn\u2019t a big deal, but his eyes claimed otherwise. I actually did intend to tell him at some point, but it snowballed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Holy crap, I was his<\/em> Nick\/Alex!<\/p>\n\n\n\n It ended. Four more lonely months of pretending to enjoy Taylor Swift videos with my wife and daughter later and my second man-date candidate entered the picture. Strangely, he was<\/em> someone I met just by sitting on my balcony, since his apartment was directly across the courtyard from ours. (I knew our daughters were already friends from school, so I opened with that.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n He looked exactly like The Rock, except that he was short like me, so he called himself \u201cThe Pebble.\u201d Every day, I\u2019d prop my laptop on my patio table to\u00a0write\u00a0and we\u2019d have chats \u2013 about life, women, our hobbies. I told him that I played guitar, and that I missed my old band. He asked what we called ourselves and I told him the story behind Jane\u2019s Eviction. (Our keyboardist\u2019s wife, Jane, sacrificed her living room for our permanent rehearsal space.) \u201cWhy don\u2019t you just sit out on your balcony and play guitar?\u201d The Pebble asked. \u201cIf I knew how to, I would.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And so I brought my\u00a0guitar\u00a0out to the balcony and serenaded a dude. And I mean\u00a0serenaded\u00a0<\/em>him. Tom Petty had just died, and I do a half-decent \u201cAmerican Girl,\u201d so it was pure catharsis.\u00a0Tears\u00a0welled up in both our eyes. The distance from that special moment to grabbing my first\u00a0beer\u00a0together with a guy in more than a year was nonexistent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Pebble drove, because he had the bar in mind. We had some brewing differences to contend with right away. He likes IPAs, and I think hops taste like what happens when you accidentally bite into a Tylenol capsule. But he began ordering me Miller Lites without insulting my complete lack of beer taste, and he surprised me with a full head of physics and history knowledge while watching the Colts trounce the 49ers. All this and his appearance also proved highly beneficial when I started my usual fifth-beer debate with the patron next to me about the scientific plausibility of time travel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other guy wasn\u2019t much bigger than Sheldon from Big Bang Theory<\/em>. But you don\u2019t need to be in order to realistically threaten to win a physical altercation with me. The Pebble told me I had enough, a correct assessment, and politely escorted me out while apologizing to Sheldon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was no way this wasn\u2019t the beginning of a beautiful\u00a0friendship. (Bicycle Brian who?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n My daughter had other plans, however. She was having a\u00a0birthday\u00a0sleepover party for only three of her many friends, none of whom were The Pebble\u2019s daughter. I\u00a0begged<\/em>\u00a0my daughter to change her selfish mind, to consider her father\u2019s needs ahead of her own for once, but the die had been cast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Pebble\u2019s wife got mad of course, and he stopped sitting out on his balcony. Not long afterward, The Pebble and his family actually moved. My daughter claims it\u2019s unrelated, that they wanted to rent a house instead of an apartment. But I know the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some Taylor Swift videos aren\u2019t so bad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By COREY LEVITAN Before our daughter, I had a tight-knit circle of about a dozen male friends. This was in Las Vegas, where my wife and I lived for 11 years. They were artists, casino executives, and other writers. We hosted parties for them and their significants at our\u00a0house\u00a0and attended\u00a0poker\u00a0nights at theirs. We went out … <\/p>\n