ORIGNALLY APPEARED IN ESQUIRE

PUMPING IRON

Don’t spread it around, but I love to iron. Every Sunday evening when the 60 Minutes clock starts ticking, I haul my folding board out of the hall closet, mantle it upright about five paces from my television set, get out a week's worth of shirts, trousers, and jeans (ironing jeans is an old cowboy  tradition), and press the bejesus out of everything while Ed, Morley, Harry, and Mike yammer away ; about problems far more serious than wrinkled fabric, and far less easily remedied. Talk's the cheap coin of information there, so it takes only an occasional glance from the board to the screen—say, when I'm flipping a sleeve—to keep up with what's going on. 

I'm not the only man who irons: I know a Pulitzered photographer who braved the fire in El Salvador (credentials for machismo seem necessary here), and he gets fifty cents for every blouse of his girlfriend's he irons. (He works too cheap.) One academic dean of my acquaintance does the smoothing, as it once was called, for his wife and son. Three cases may not constitute-a trend, but it's obvious that the distaff half of the global population has forsaken this old, joyous craft. Like so much of our work done by hand, it has fallen into disfavor. It's linked with domestic slavery; of all the household chores once designated as women's work, ironing seems to have been the most odious, so it now carries the most trenchant political overtones. You don't ask a woman to iron a garment for you (even if you've found one who knows how) any more than you might request that she greet you at the door in a rip-off French maid's costume, a martini in hand and your slippers in her teeth. .

Naturally I could argue that it was good enough for my mother, but she's given it up, too. In the days before steam irons my mother had to douse her clean wash in a cooked starch solution/dry it on a clothesline, and sprinkle each piece with water from a huge green Coca-Cola bottle stoppered with a perforated aluminum nozzle shaped like a flower. She'd roll each piece and place it in a plastic bag to let it marinate for a time. Then she'd unfold the items one by one and diligently cook them just short of scorching, until they were stiff as canvas. To get into one of my just-ironed shirts, I'd have to form a wedge with my hand and peel the interior surfaces of the sleeves apart as I stuck my arm through. Now that was ironing! (You can still buy the same result by sending shirts to the laundry and ordering "heavy starch," but by the fourth time around the buttons will have disintegrated from, I'm guessing, harsh chemicals or too much heat.) I remember how she'd put her hair up in a bandanna like Lucy, and the sweat would pop from her brow; she wasn't a soap opera fan, but she always ironed near the radio to hear “Don McNeill and the Breakfast Club.” ("And now... let's march around the breakfast ta­ble!") These days, though, she never buys cotton unless it's meant to be worn rumpled or it sneaks into the house as dental floss or on the ends of Q-Tips.

My mother-in-law is a throwback who still irons handkerchiefs, underwear, and sheets. But her daughter (my wife) kept her eyes shut all the years she lived at home, largely because of the sound suspi­cion that learning a craft might require that it be practiced later in life. So her white double-breasted Calvin Klein blouse of 100 percent cotton with ten pearl snaps up the front goes into my laundry basket. I don't mind; in fact, nothing pleases me more than to square off against an all-cotton garment. It comes out of the dryer as wrinkled as used tinfoil; it requires a lot of ironing, but then, it also takes it well. The metamorphosis is profound and admi­rable. Nothing is more frustrating than to try to make a shirt of 65 percent polyester and 35 percent cotton look as if it has been ironed. It resists my efforts in a nightmar­ish way, retains the wrinkles "permanent press" is not supposed to have in the first place, and when I'm finished, I can't tell the difference. These never-press fab­rics were supposed to have freed women from the slavery of ironing, but in me they merely produce an exasperating sense of impotence.

Old female hands at this no doubt snicker to hear a man grumble about these small difficulties. Any man who takes up ironing will hear a lot of l-told-you-so's from women who are also encouraging us to cook, wash, and baby-sit, on the theory that if we get a taste of it we'll understand why they want to give it all up for more-glamorous careers in used-car sales and digital-watch assembly. They've been at this switcheroo ever since somebody talked Roosevelt Grier into taking up nee­dlepoint, and they persist in protesting that ironing cripples the spirit. For in­stance, Erma Bombeck, who claimed that she ironed "by appointment only," once told an inveterate ironer who pressed the tongues of her son's tennis shoes that women simply did not do that anymore. "Did you ever see the women on the soap operas iron?" she asked this Mrs. Breck. "No! They're out having abortions, committing murder, blackmailing their boss, undergoing surgery, having fun! If you weren't chained to this ironing board,, you, too, could be out doing all sorts of exciting things!"

I could claim that I iron only because I can't find a woman who'll do it for me, but that's not even a half-truth. 1 don't have to iron; I get to iron. It's been that way with me since boot camp, when I was nineteen and first discovered the joy of creasing khaki with a hot aluminum plate. I won my first iron by shooting in the top five in my platoon on the rifle range. That iron's been lost for years, and I now use an ordinary B-flat GE I picked up in a garage sale. Now and then I get a yen for what I think of as the Cadillac of steam irons, a Sun­beam "Deluxe Shot of Steam Iron." (How quaint-—"Deluxe"!) You got your water-gauge on it, so you don't have to guess by watching the steam languish that it needs refilling. You got your fifty-one big steam vents. (Mine has thirty-eight.) You got your "Extra Steam at the Touch of a But­ton" for that surge of power you need pass­ing on hills. It's self-cleaning—no starch buildups that make the skating surface gummy and hard to slide. At three pounds of chrome-plated steel, this baby will put a sizable dent in your Adidas if you drop it. A manly tool. It retails for around forty-eight dollars. I'd buy one, except that I'm wait­ing for my old one to wear out, and that's like keeping your eye peeled for Halley's comet. With only one or two moving parts, irons don't break down. You can gunk one up by using highly mineralized water in it or by not emptying the surplus when you finish ironing, so that the heating elements rust or collect deposits, but it's pretty hard to outlive this machinery.

Over the years manufacturers have added improvements, such as the reversible cord for switch-hitting—this year Sunbeam even came out with a model that shuts itself off if it suspects a scorched shirt or a distracting phone call—but the durable simplicity of the design leaves little room for tampering to make it better. The old rowboat shape, with a bow that bobs easily between buttons and a broad stern that sails trippingly, o'er the main, has never been altered, to my knowledge, for hun­dreds of years, and that motif is carried out in the contours of the board. (Apply a little elementary Freudian symbolism here, and your hand becomes "the little man in the boat," with the iron as the boat; or, in a significantly telling nesting image, the iron itself becomes "the little man" sailing his boat, the board. I could, but I won't, go on with this.) To my mind, the only improve­ment left to be made in the tools is to have a board that goes up and down with ease. I've never tried to set one up that I didn't feel as if I were wrestling with an angry stork.

Once I've done that, though, the rest is, well, smooth sailing. I take a shirt, spread it on my board and give it a few shots from my can of spray starch (both sides, extra dose on the collar), then set to work. My movements are ritualistic: first the sleeves (both sides), then the collar (first pressed flat, then folded and ironed along the crease), then I fit the shirt over the broad end of the board as if the board were to be wearing it, press one side of the breast (if the pocket has flaps, all the better), then the other, turn the shirt over to do the back in one piece, then tug the hem down to bring the yoke over the end of the board to be pressed. Along about the third item, I can feel my pulse slowing, my breathing leveling out. Something like a trance de­scends as I smell the clean starch-and-steam aroma drifting up from the iron. My problems seem to dissipate with the steam, and soon I hear a humming in my inner ear; a calm, somnolent voice purrs, "Al-pha, al-pha, al-pha," as all rejection and dejection are pressed into harmless memory like petals between pages.

When I'm finished with the shirt, I can hold it up between my hands and see if I've done a good job or not. Precious few things in life lend themselves to such immediate, definitive judgment. What you've done, good or bad, is undeniable: you've brought order to chaos,, and it's either ironed well or it's not. If it's not, you can touch it up in seconds flat. You apply a minimum of ener­gy in an enjoyable fashion, and the payoff far exceeds that small cost. It's not like a customer lost for reasons that must be discerned and then explained to yourself or your superior; it's not one of your chil­dren who has done something childish but who is too big to spank; it's not an argu­ment with your spouse over whose career is to take precedence. No sticky, no-win trade-offs. No relativism. I am; therefore, I iron. 

"But," objected one woman I know who used to iron, "aren't you frustrated when it just gets wrinkled again?" I said, honestly, no. It makes me feel adult and rather man­ly, the way my mother and grandmother must have always felt when they stood in the hot kitchen for days making pies and cakes from scratch and stuffing the turkey so that when company came, they'd have a whooping, thirty-minute Thanksgiving orgy. Glad the men enjoyed it, they'd savor with relish their secret—the men had no idea how much work had gone into it. .

A chore, by definition, must be done over and over. That's what makes it dif­ferent from a task. The objection raised by my woman friend suggests to me that women are growing childishly masculine about doing chores, because they have retrained themselves to perceive that tasks—changing a tire, shooting one deer a year—are masculine by tradition and are therefore more attractive.

And sure they are, in a way. They're easier; any fool can do something once, but it takes a mature adult to do something again and again and know that it will never really be finished. Performing this weekly chore is like a little disciplinary koan, a humble pleasure-giving mantra that can bring serenity to my hectic life. Well, that's laying it on a bit thick. But at least I've had so much fun doing such a common and mundane thing that as I'm putting the last flourish to my Levi's while 60 Minutes goes off I wonder why Andy Rooney hasn't discovered it yet. 

ESQUIRE/MARCH 1984