Jay frowned and looked mildly uncomfortable. “Sex?” he hazarded.
Colman grinned. “You’re right, but you’re supposed to pretend you don’t know about that. I was thinking of something else–recognition. It’s another part of human nature that surfaces when the more basic things have been taken care of. And when it does, it gets to be just as powerful as the rest. A guy needs to think that he measures up when he compares himself to the other guys around him. He needs to be recognized for what’s good about him and to stand out. Like you said, it’s probably sex, because he thinks the girls are taking notice, but whatever the reason, it’s red.”
Jay was beginning to see the connection. “Measures up with respect to what?” he asked. “What’s the standard?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Colman told him. “It’s different in different places. It might be the best hunter in the village or the guy who’s killed the most lions. It might be the way you paint your face. Through most of history it’s been money. What you buy with it isn’t important. What’s ‘important is that the things you buy say to all the other guys, ‘I’ve got what it takes to earn what you have to, to buy all this stuff, and you haven’t. Therefore I’m better than you.’ That’s what it’s all about.”
“Why’s it so important to be better than somebody?”
“I told you, it’s an instinct. You can’t fight it. It’s like being thirsty.”
“Am I supposed to feel that way?”
“You do. Don’t you like it when your team wins in the Bowl? Why do you work hard at school? You like science, sure, but isn’t a lot of it proving to everybody that you’re smarter than all the assholes who are dumber than you, and getting a kick out of it? Be honest. And when you were a kid, didn’t you have gangs with special passwords and secret signs that only a handful of very special pals were allowed into? I bet you did.”
Jay nodded and smiled. “You’re right. We did.”
“We all did. And it doesn’t change when you get older. It gets worse. Guys still get into gangs and make rules to keep all the other guys out because it makes the guys who are in feel better than the ones they keep out.” . !-..,
“But the rules are so dumb,” lay protested. “They don’t make sense. Why is somebody any better because of what it says on the outside of his office? It’s what h~ does inside that matters.”
“They don’t have to make sense. All they have to do is say you’re different. Now do you get it? Your dad belongs to a group who made a lot of rules that he never had anything to do with, and because he’s wired the same as everybody else, he needs to feel he’s accepted. To be accepted, he has to be seen to go by the rules. If he didn’t he’d become a threat to the group, and they’d reject him. And nobody can take that. Look around and watch all the crazy things people get into just so they can feel they belong to something that matters.”
“Even you?”
“Sure. What could be crazier than the Army?”
“You’re not crazy,” Jay said. “So what made you join?” “It was a group, just like I’ve been saying–something to belong to. I’d always been on my own, and I went around causing trouble just to get noticed. People are like that. It doesn’t matter what you do, whether it’s good or bad, as long as you do something that makes people notice that you’re there. Nothing’s worse than not making any difference to anything.” Colman shrugged. “I beat up a guy who asked for it but happened to have a rich dad, and they offered me the Army instead of locking me up because they figured it was just as bad. I jumped at it.”
Jay drank some more of his coffee, stared at his cup in silence for what seemed a long time, then said without looking up, “I’ve been thinking on and off… you know, I think I’d like to get into the Army. What would be the best way of going about it?”