Photograph by Jennifer Hengst
The email came from “Mr. Warrior.” It was blunt and harsh, but it actually wasn’t as aggressive and full of vitriol as you might expect an email from a person calling himself Mr. Warrior would be—just an exasperated, matter-of-fact, “Hey, I thought you should know” kind of statement. This is, more or less, what it said:
“I can’t believe you get paid to write such stupid stuff.”
Bob Rybarczyk loves emails like that. Loves them. He wishes he got more of them. The guy prints them out and hangs them in his office at work, for crying out loud, like those proud moms who pin their kids’ sloppy crayon drawings to the walls of their cubicles so that everyone who walks by will stop and look. He forwards them to friends. He revels in the hate.
Rybarczyk [pronounced ruh-BAR-zik] gets a lot of nice emails, too—usually of the “Oh my God, it seems like you’re writing about my life!” variety—but he doesn’t think those are nearly as fun. His fascination with hate mail would probably seem masochistic and a little weird if it weren’t for the fact that he genuinely seems to get a kick out of it. “They’re not writing because they disagree with me,” he says, laughing. “They’re writing to tell me I suck, which I think is the greatest hate mail of all.”
“Suck” is a relative term in Rybarczyk’s “little corner of cyberspace,” as he calls it. You’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who will argue that the subject matter of “Suburban Fringe,” his humor column that runs every Tuesday on the Post-Dispatch’s website, is highbrow stuff. Last spring, he declared war on the rabbits that were ravaging his garden; over the summer, he devoted a significant portion of one column to describing the consistency of the discharge from his poison ivy rash; and a recent dispatch described the events leading up to and including his 6-year-old daughter’s vomiting into his mouth.
Like I said, a little closer to Jackass than James Joyce—but people read it. A lot of people, especially as of late. After more than five years of up-and-down readership, the column seems to have found a groove, routinely topping STLtoday’s “Most Emailed Stories” list for nearly a year now. Although the site’s online news director, Kurt Greenbaum, wouldn’t reveal specific numbers, he would say that thousands read it every week. “The traffic to the column does rather well,” he says. “It’s not a huge investment in mental brainpower to devour Bob’s column on a week-to-week basis. He’s definitely serving an audience.”
An audience can say a lot about the object of its affection, but whatever images Greenbaum’s unstated assessment of “Suburban Fringe” fans may conjure for you—not to mention what guys like Mr. Warrior might think of him—Rybarczyk’s not that guy. Witty, dry and self-deprecating, he’s hardly the base simpleton that columns like “Revenge of the Crazy eBay Lady” would have you believe. The 38-year-old Ballwin resident works for a public relations firm. He drives his daughters to school every day. He does yard work on the weekend. He could just as easily be your next-door neighbor—if your next-door neighbor were a skinny, 6-5, slightly awkward guy who was all arms and legs.
“Most of my life is the life of an ordinary guy,” he says. “I just happen to write a column, and that’s three hours of my week on a weekend, and then I almost kind of don’t think about it for the rest of the week.”
***
Rybarczyk and I are standing amid a sea of panties. Pillowy hills of thongs and boy shorts and those little Brazilian-cut things in numbers that together could cover the windows of a small office building—but by themselves would struggle to cover a grown woman’s behind—rest on display cases throughout the Victoria’s Secret at the West County Center. But to read Rybarczyk’s expression, they might as well be turtles.
That’s not to say that he’s not inherently interested in the silk and lace and chiffon. It has more to do with the fact that what has brought him here is foot lotion for his wife, Colette. It turns out that Rybarczyk is quite the foot-massage master; sometimes, when he’s feeling really generous, he’ll rub down Colette’s feet three times in a week. “We’ll be sitting there in bed, watching TV, and she’ll bat her eyes at me,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. “And then every once in a while, I’ll just volunteer to do it.”
Believe it or not, this is his idea of a nice little Saturday. He actually has some free time because his two daughters (you may know them from the column as Chi-Chi and Gustavo) are with his ex-wife for the weekend, and Colette’s daughter (you may know her as Melon Ball) is with her ex-husband. See, he has to take the foot-lotion shopping that he’s ambivalent about and the football-game watching that he loves and the random-chore finishing that he doesn’t like but knows he has to do anyway and cram it into the few minutes he can find in a relentless schedule that resembles the relentless schedule of just about every thirtysomething dad you know.
And that’s pretty much the way things were 6½ years ago when he started writing “Suburban Fringe.” The way he got the job was a fluke. You know that guy in your office who can never just send a normal email, the guy who always has to crack a joke or make a smartass comment to spice up a message about something as mundane as benefits packages? That was Rybarczyk. So when STLtoday was looking for quirky young writers for a new daily column called “STL Voices” in summer 2001, Beth Wiggins, a former co-worker of Rybarczyk’s who had left to take a job at the website, instantly thought of him. “We had these happy hours every first Friday, and he would send out these emails, and they were hilarious,” Wiggins says. So she suggested to Thomas Crone, the site’s editor at the time, that Rybarczyk might be somebody who would “fit the bill.”
Crone gave Rybarczyk a shot, and his first column—an unashamed admission of his tendency to get lost in the city despite having grown up in Florissant and lived here his entire life—was a relative success. “Thomas emailed me the next day and said, ‘Wow, what’s your secret? You got quadruple the number of readers that this column usually gets,’” Rybarczyk says. “I had just assumed all of my friends I’d mentioned it to had gone and read it.”
When Rybarczyk’s second column drew even larger numbers, Crone offered him a weekly gig. “Bob’s column seemed to gain a sort of cult following fairly early,” says Crone, a frequent St. Louis Magazine contributor. “Of the new content pieces, his always seemed to register consistently.”
And it continued to pick up readers until a little over a year later, when the site’s staff, including Crone, was let go and Greenbaum, the site’s new editor, was forced to cut costs. Rybarczyk’s column was the first to go.
“So that kind of sucked for about five weeks,” Rybarczyk says, and although those may not seem like the words of a man devastated by such a sudden blow, it’s hard to miss his tone that says losing the column was a big disappointment. But once Greenbaum realized how popular “Suburban Fringe” was—he got hundreds of complaints about its disappearance—he asked Rybarczyk if he’d like to start writing again. “I was, of course, more than happy to come back,” Rybarczyk says. And love it or hate it, it’s been running ever since.
To think that Mr. Warrior might never have had a target for his email attacks ...
***
“The original intent of the column was really to focus more on things that are uniquely suburban, but to be honest, that was a topic that started to go dry for me very quickly,” Rybarczyk says one Sunday night, shortly after finishing a column about his older daughter’s particularly trying bout with the stomach flu. (No, not the one where his daughter threw up in his mouth—this was a different vomit-centric column.) “At the end of the day, things that are uniquely suburban about suburban life are boring in a lot of ways and don’t make for good copy.”
As much as Rybarczyk may be interested in topics that make for good copy, he found out early on that he doesn’t exactly have the stomach for stirring up trouble just to get a laugh. It hadn’t taken long for the “family life in the ’burbs” theme to bore Crone, either, so he encouraged Rybarczyk to write about his experiences in the county. And he did; he went to the Dorsett Inn, near Westport Plaza, soaked up the atmosphere and wrote all about the “cheesy” band he saw perform there. And he caught hell for it.
“The lead singer of the band sent me a very long and angry note,” Rybarczyk says. “He just went to great lengths to say that they’d been doing it for a while, the Dorsett Inn was a big deal for them, it was their one stable gig ...” He trails off. Either he lost his train of thought or the guilt is still there, more than five years later.
A week later, over a plate of fish and chips in Soulard, he brings up the fallout over the Dorsett Inn column again, this time in a conversation about how he knows when he’s gone too far. “That was the column that shaped the policy that I adhere to now,” he says. “There are a lot of people who do things that I sort of snicker at, but not everybody deserves to be made fun of. I think a column is funnier and works more when I’m making fun of myself.”
That tendency toward self-deprecation is his stock in trade—so much so that it creeps out of the column and into conversations about everything from sports (“I tried out for basketball my sophomore year, and everyone kept saying, ‘You can jump higher than that, can’t you?’”) to his not-so-successful days as a theater geek in high school: “It made me appreciate good acting.”
(You only have to talk to him a couple times to understand why the acting thing didn’t work out and why he never tried stand-up, despite having an interest in it: He speaks in a monotone that would put most audiences to sleep. The interesting thing, though, was that when I went back and read the transcripts of our conversations, I found myself laughing at a lot of what he’d said. He’s so dry and unassuming in person that if you’re not paying attention, you’d never even know he had a sense of humor.)
As tame as his writing can be, it might come as a suprise that Rybarczyk is a huge fan of Howard Stern—until he admits that it’s the shock jock’s insistence on not setting limits on what he’ll reveal about himself that Rybarczyk likes so much. In fact, he wanted to make “Suburban Fringe” edgier early on but ultimately decided to spare his family the embarrassment that would come with that kind of candor—assuming that they’re not embarrassed by the level of candor he already exhibits. And just in case his filter breaks down occasionally, Colette reviews all of his columns before he submits them. “In general, if I think something is getting a little too close to an edge or is something that might be considered a little questionable, I’ll just leave it out,” he says. (Two weeks after he said that, STLtoday rejected a column he submitted, deeming it inappropriate. It was the first time in “Suburban Fringe” history that had ever happened. Rybarczyk declined to talk about the rejected column’s subject matter out of respect for the site’s decision not to run it.)
For all the things that it’s not, “Suburban Fringe” is actually a little deeper than its pedestrian topics might suggest. Beneath all the stories about bodily functions and “manscaping” and Halloween costumes for pets, there’s the unmistakable subtext—by design or not—of a guy who, even though he may have one day thought he was meant for bigger and better things, has decided that the only way to make a middle-of-the-road life livable is by making fun of it. Go ahead and roll your eyes, but if you go back and look at six months’ worth of his writing, you’ll actually see a common theme start to emerge: “regular” guy finds himself put in an uncomfortable situation by someone or something else; he complains—impotently—about the effects this situation has on him; he resigns himself to the situation and pokes fun at himself for landing in this predicament in the first place. Granted, it doesn’t happen in every column—let’s face it, there’s nothing too deep to be read into a story about a little girl vomiting into her dad’s mouth—but a lot of weeks Rybarczyk manages to capture the arrested development of today’s overworked, underfulfilled, domesticated man. Writing—and for that matter, reading—“Suburban Fringe” might not be as cathartic and life-affirming as, say, starting up a fight club, but it’s a hell of a lot less bloody.
Those people who write Rybarczyk to tell him that he sucks would probably laugh at the suggestion that there’s something going on under the surface of “Suburban Fringe”—but then he’s not writing it for them anyway. “I think I appeal to people who lead a life similar to mine, but I like to think that the humor I write is smart,” he says. “I feel like the stuff that I write is best appreciated by people who are pretty smart—which is not necessarily the same as well-educated.”
After pausing, he says this: “The people who live in the city, a lot of them think life in the county is completely boring and dull and there’s nothing interesting going on.”
He doesn’t elaborate on that point—the conversation shifts to the never-ending culture war between the city and the county—but he doesn’t have to because the implication is there anyway. Those people who tell him he sucks, they’re not just telling him his writing sucks—they’re kind of telling him his life sucks, too.
***
Good or bad, rich in subtext or vapid and a little gross, “Suburban Fringe” has a devoted following, and by Rybarczyk’s own admission, a lot of that has to do with its relatability, which begs the question: If that many people can relate to that much of his life, doesn’t that make him a lot like them? How is he any different from every other regular guy in suburbia?
“I’m not, really.”
Is he OK with that?
“Yeah. Honestly, I don’t really think about it. I kind of do what makes me happy. I think there’s definitely some unique things about me. The column is unique, in and of itself.”
And just then, as he stands outside of that Victoria’s Secret and the nameless, faceless crowds rush past him on their way to buy more stuff, I can’t help but remember something he said about the column the first time we talked:
“It’s not always a work of joy, but I like knowing that I’ve written. If my editor called me tomorrow and said, ‘Hey, we’re not going to do “Suburban Fringe” anymore,’ I’d be crushed. As much as I never really set out to be a writer, now that I am one, I don’t really think I could have that taken away from me.”
