Tales from the Dad Side (12 page)

“This is not how it was supposed to work out!” he screamed as he slammed the door to his room. I was relieved. I didn't really want him driving seventy miles to a concert on his first day, and besides, what about the crime problem in Camden? How could I live with myself if my son accidentally ran over a carjacker?

After two more months of intensive screaming/instruction, I escorted my son to the Lodi, New Jersey, DMV, which was just a couple of curb cuts from Satin Dolls, which was used as the location for the Bada Bing strip joint in
The Sopranos
. But my son wasn't thinking lap dances, he was thinking lap belts. “Click it or ticket,” the banner announced.

Peter's examiner was a very nice man who reviewed his previous exam and, being one last test away from quitting time, pointed into the middle distance and said, “Get me around that pole over there, and if you don't flip the car on the way back, you'll pass.”

He passed, and we were understandably relieved, until our new car-insurance policy arrived and we discovered that the very large number near our name was not our zip code, but our new premium.

One of the things my father taught me I have passed on to my children. Whenever he'd brake too hard, he'd automatically stiff-arm his passenger back when seats were slippery and seat belts were still on the drawing board. Now when Peter drives and brakes too hard or too fast, he throws his arm to my chest to make sure I don't hit the dash. And once he knows I'm all right, he'll shove his hand into my wallet to get money for dinner and a show.

My daughter Mary was next, and a new drivers school was employed. A tall, patient man arrived one Tuesday afternoon for her first lesson. It was an out-of-body experience to see our little girl drive off into the sunset with a man in a dented Camry with STUDENT
DRIVER in humongous letters on the roof that could easily be viewed from Google Earth.

(Note to drivers schools: Maybe a dented car isn't the best advertising, unless your company slogan is “We haven't totaled one yet.”)

Ninety minutes later, she returned with a breathless recapitulation of hair-raising stories of life on the road: initially terrified, she then found it exhilarating. Two more lessons and she graduated with honors and was presented with a certificate suitable for putting in a drawer and never looking at again.

Mary, Mary, was not contrary, but she was very conservative behind the wheel. She drove like a jumpy ninety-four-year-old woman who'd once forced a vanload of orphan cats and dogs off a mountain pass. Unlike her older sibling, she not only stopped at the red octagon sign but she spelled aloud “S-T-O-P,” a trick her teacher taught her for timing an ample stop. Combine that drawn-out spelling with a bit of reluctance to mosey back into traffic, and in a New York minute the driver behind us laid on the horn because they didn't like waiting at a stop sign long enough to process a roll of film.

“Why is he honking?” She was frantically looking at the rearview.

“Because he's late for his anger-management class. Let's go.”

On our last practice lap before her driving test, as we passed a stone church on a main drag in our town, a car zipped up behind and beeped its horn for us to speed up. Pulling down the passenger visor mirror, I observed that the tailgater had ratcheted up the pressure on my daughter and was now also flashing the high beams like the highway patrol. The horn honking, light flashing, and unsafe tailgating went on for five blocks, until we hit a red light, where the tailgater laid on the horn.

“Put it in park,” I said, reflexively opening the door. “Don't move.”

“Daddy, where are you going?”

Where was I going and what was I doing?
Once I'd committed to jumping out like some hothead it occurred to me that the driver might have a perfectly good explanation for wanting us to hurry.
Maybe it was a volunteer firefighter heading to a fire, or it might be a longshoreman with a lead pipe.

Half expecting to see a member of an organized-crime family with a five o'clock shadow, I was surprised to see that all of this road rage was the work of a petite woman about thirty.

“Roll down the window,” I mouthed, and pantomimed with a circular hand-cranking gesture to the figure behind the tinted glass. At first she pretended she didn't understand, so I repeated and waited.

“What's your hurry?” I asked in a painfully friendly way.

“I'm late. Your wife was going way too slow.”

“First of all, that's my daughter, who is learning how to drive. If it were my wife she would have come back here by now and stuffed you like a manicotti.”

She just sat their staring straight ahead waiting for the light to change. “Sorry, I was in a hurry.”

“For…”

She paused.

“For…a Pilates class.” Suddenly the ill-fitting Lycra getup made sense. My disgust duly registered, I gave her an eye roll and a full five-finger wave as I climbed back into my car. I wanted to say, “Forget Pilates, you need an abs class,” but that would have been wrong. Funny, but just wrong.

Mary high-fived me, and I instructed her to drive exactly twenty miles an hour for the next half mile, slowing down to hit the next light so we'd roadblock the Lycra lady from making the class at the YMCA in time. We're good people, but there had to be a little payback.

Mary passed the test on her second try.

Reviewing my driver instructor record, I realize that I yelled too much with my son and was too laid back with my daughter; in other words I was first talk radio and then NPR without the tote bag.

I will not repeat those errors with my third and final child. On Sally's seventeenth birthday, when she is old enough to drive and every other kid in her class is at the DMV, I'm going to take her straight
to the bank, where I shall withdraw one thousand dollars and press it squarely in her hand, and give her the best driving advice she'll ever need.

“When you have to go someplace, call a cab.”

By then surely Bell Labs will have perfected an everyday jet belt and she won't have to worry about tailgaters, baling machines, or Pilates.

The Birds, the Bees, and the Rubber
What
?

A
fter an exhausting day of dodging manatees in a friend's motor-boat on the Intracoastal Waterway in Boca Raton, we returned to his house, where the children took turns washing off the salt water in an outdoor shower. My job in such a situation was to inventory my children's whereabouts, and I was doing just that when I realized two were missing. I opened a side door to the house, where I located Sally standing in the foyer staring up the stairs where her second-grade male classmate was prancing around twirling a large towel while completely naked.

Uh-oh.

I would describe what I was witnessing as a
shaky butt dance
. He was performing with wild abandon because he thought he had an audience of only one. Sally stood below cackling like someone who'd been trapped for a month in a nitrous oxide plant.

I understand the toddlers' urge to run around the house naked, but they were seven years old and way past that. An intervention was required as nature boy went nuts.

“Hi, guys, what's happening?” I announced from far stage left out of their sight.

“Oh, jeez!”

The pint-sized Chippendale stopped shaking his groove thing, grabbed his wet suit, and slammed a door behind him. That was eight years ago; today Sally does not think nudity is a laughing mat
ter. Like a former chocoholic who has sworn off Godivas, she has morphed into our most modest of children, uncomfortably knocking at puberty's front door.

As a member of the varsity swim team, once out of the pool she instantly encases herself in an oversized towel so her Speedo boy teammates don't notice that she is a girl. Her clothes go over her swimsuit for the ride home as she soaks the seat. Dashing upstairs to the bathroom, where the curtains are drawn, the door is locked, and the lights are dimmed, she showers wearing her swimsuit. Once the stink of chlorine is gone, she adjourns to her bedroom wrapped in a terry-cloth burka. She shows as much skin as a Saudi Arabian Hooters.

This subject of children and sex is fraught with anxiety. Children want and need to know things just like their parents do, as long as they don't have to do the explaining. Two of Mary's high school classmates contracted meningitis, which sent us to the doctor for a prophylactic shot of vaccine. The kids were very sick, and Mary was as freaked out as I'd ever seen her. She was trembling in the examination room, with both arms around my neck. The doctor arrived and quizzed her on possible symptoms. She had none. I have been to the pediatrician with the kids a hundred times, but this was the first time I'd accompanied her as a high schooler. I immediately noticed a difference in the doctor's line of questioning from the days when she was still wearing Barney and Baby Bop underpants.

“Mary, is there any reason to believe you're pregnant?”

Modest and proper, she froze and said nothing. This was the first time the embarrassing topic of sex had been brought up in front of her father. I quickly turned translator: “She's not pregnant.”

Not the sharpest scalpel in the shed, the doctor continued. “Dad, cover your ears. Mary, on a scale of one to ten, how sexually active are you?”

Mary was as embarrassed as I'd ever seen her. Meanwhile I wondered, On a scale of one to ten, how sexually active am I? A happily married father of three, was I a ten, or to approach the upper
tier does one need to have a Mexican cartwheel on one's résumé? It seemed an inopportune time to ask the doctor a personal follow-up.

“Mary, you're fine, don't worry,” the doctor said before he gave her the $175 shot, which was not covered by my company's health plan.

Back in the car, not a word was said about the distressing doctor talk. There were some things in life you simply don't joke about, like sex talk with children or how Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's open-collar look seemed to be based on Tom Cruise's in
Rain Man
.

Nobody in my family ever spilled the sex beans to me; I had to pick it up on the mean streets of Wakefield, Kansas, where due to a misunderstanding with my chemistry teacher I spent an hour reflecting on my chattiness at the conclusion of the school day. I had never been in detention before, and when selecting a seat to serve my sentence, I sat at a table near the far wall with two seniors.

One boy was dreamily recounting what sounded like a professional wrestling match the night before in the backseat of his Ford Maverick. I'd heard the name of the girl he was describing before, and I knew she was very popular with the upperclassmen, and as I listened, I learned why. As an eighth-grade boy, I had not yet been told by my father about the birds and the bees, and what I was learning in the library really had nothing to do with either birds or bees.

Until that moment I had no idea how sex worked, none whatsoever; the ever vigilant student, I barely batted an eyelash, drinking in every single disgusting detail, trying desperately to act nonchalant.

That is so gross, I kept thinking. No wonder he was in detention.

The clock hit five, we were released, and life as I knew it had changed in those sixty minutes. I'd gone into that study hall a carefree junior high school boy, and I walked out finally knowing what happened behind closed bedroom doors or on the hump in the back of a Detroit subcompact.

There was an unexpected chill in the air as I opened the school's front door. The sky didn't seem as bright, and I was no longer an innocent young man. My mom waited in the parking lot, and when I
climbed in I could tell she was mad at me for the detention. Mad at me? After what I'd just learned I wanted to scream, “I know your secret! How could you?” The answer was obviously “easily” because I had four sisters.

The only detention I ever had in my life, and I think the Almighty sent me to that study hall that day so my father wouldn't have a nervous breakdown when he had to tell me about sex. Coincidence, as I've said, is God's way of working anonymously.

A dozen years later I was in the car with my parents and my fiancée, Kathy Gerrity, the day before our wedding. I had heard about sex, but I still had not gotten the Talk from my father, and the sex-talk hourglass was running out of sand.

“Dad, tomorrow's the honeymoon. Want to fill me in on anything?”

I watched the corners of his smile turn up into a mischievous smirk, but he chose to say nothing. However, the family's arbiter of good taste, my mom, was riding limo style and punctuated the momentary uneasiness with “Stephen, this is neither the time nor the place.”

“It's now or never….”

Irked, my mother knew she'd rue the day one of her children would ask about s-e-x, but she had an alibi. “Stephen, don't you remember we gave you that book that explained it all?”

What book? She kept an illustrated medical manual on a high shelf, and one time when I was sick at home I used it to look up strep throat, only to discover pictures of unknown body parts and an accompanying text written so drily that I returned to diseases of the throat. I stared blankly at my mom, who cut to the chase: “Remember, it had a rubber tree on the cover.”

Rubber tree?

Then the long-term-memory floodgates opened. “You mean that book you gave me in fourth grade, from the Time-Life Collection?”

My mother nodded, knowing she'd fulfilled her parental duty by supplying me with a book with all the answers for all of my sex ques
tions. The reason I didn't remember it at first was because it wasn't a sex book but one about plant reproduction. It had not an iota of actual carnal knowledge. The book she should have given me would have arrived in a brown paper wrapper and contained illustrations with humans, and had useful answers to foreplay questions like how much Brut can a man apply before a woman's eyes start to water like she was hit with tear gas?

My mother and father apparently felt they were off the hook and never mentioned the topic again. My fiancée was probably planning to bolt from the car at the next stoplight and run to the safety of a normal family, but sadly for the future bride, there were no stoplights in my town.

I made a mental pledge that day that if I was ever blessed with children, they would get the sex talk from their parents when it was time.

We did have children, and as soon as they were talking we wondered, How early should a responsible parent address sex? When my three-year-old son watched his naked sister squirm on the changing table, he found himself at eye level with a view of her bare bottom that he'd never noticed before. At that exact moment nature called and as she peed it ran down her bottom.
Eureka!
He realized for the first time that boys and girls have different plumbing.

“Mommy, where's her penis?”

Relying upon a parenting book that was clearly written by somebody who'd never had children, Kathy answered the question honestly and clinically. Pointing to the no-man's-land on the bottom of his sister, my wife gave him the lowdown.

“Peter, boys have penises and girls have vaginas.”

His face screwed up a little as if she'd just described, strand by strand, the chemical makeup of DNA; it was clear all he'd heard was a new word that started with a
v.

“Mom, I know we live in
Virginia.
Where's her penis?”

Virginia, vagina, let's call the whole thing off.

Kathy perfectly addressed the issue, answering his sex question
honestly and directly. Within seconds it was in one ear and out the other as he moved on to worrying about a moth he spied outside the screen window that he was afraid would get into the house that night and eat his eyebrows.

The next day as my wife and children were in the checkout lane at Safeway, Peter watched Bob the checker ring up the groceries. Bob was having a nice conversation with my wife, who was carrying our new baby girl in a Snugli, and apparently Peter was feeling a little left out of the conversation, so he decided to join in.

“My sister has a penis in her butt.”

Bob slowed down a moment to look directly at our eldest son. My wife said it got very warm in the store.

“Yesterday I saw a penis in her butt!”

Bob continued his stare of suspicion and probably pushed the secret button under the counter to alert child welfare authorities of a child predator in checkout line 3.

Bob was not a parent. He was a part-time produce guy who would have appreciated my mother's rubber-tree book. He didn't know that Peter had seen his sister peeing, with it running down her backside, or that Peter had been told that “boys have penises and girls have vaginas.” Nor did he know that kids' brains work like martini shakers, adding up to the grocery store epiphany “My sister has a penis in her butt.”

My wife could have explained what had happened, and Peter would surely have backed her up, but at that moment she didn't feel she owed it to the man who'd given her the identical stink eye when she inadvertently tried to cash an expired coupon for a dollar off Yo-plait yogurt cups.

Peter's public comments and questions about sex lay dormant for seven years until the family was watching breakfast television during the impeachment testimony regarding Monica the “Clintern.”

“What's oral sex?” Peter queried over Frosted Mini Wheats, repeating something he'd just heard the commentators mention.

The fastest-thinking spinmeister I've ever met, his mother an
swered almost automatically. “Oral means talk,” she said as he nodded. “So oral sex is when you
talk
about sex.”

A fantastic and seemingly plausible answer, it shut him up until later in the day when he probably told his classmates, “My poor parents, they don't know what oral sex is.”

A funny thing happened on the way to the sex talk for my son. The longer I waited to tell him, the harder and harder it got, until late in his high school years I had the feeling that I would procrastinate until I was face-to-face with my son in the coatroom at his wedding reception, just before he got into the limo for his honeymoon in a Poconos champagne-glass bathtub.

But then one day, it was time. Between my son's sophomore and junior years in high school he and his cousin Dane would spend their summer at Oxford, land of rampant beer drinking and girls with cute Kate Winslet accents that boys dug. I had prepared in my head a speech that stressed abstinence, and would ask him, if he ever met a girl and fell in love with her and then engaged in the “whole nine yards,” what would be left for the next date, a kidney transplant?

For this superdelicate, once-in-a-lifetime father-son talk, I chose the intimate and confidential location of Yankee Stadium. Sometime around the seventh-inning stretch, I decided it was time as we sat there in a cone of silence, surrounded by forty-eight thousand drunk guys.

“Listen, Peter, while you're away you may find yourself…” That was as far as I got.

“Dad, don't.”

“Things may happen—”

“We don't have to talk about this now.” He squirmed.

“There are things you haven't seen on cable—”

“Please, Dad, stop it!”

“Why?”

“They explained it all in health class, okay?”

The sweaty palms, the seventeen-year fear that he'd hear what it was all about and the sky would darken as had happened to me,
all that for naught? It was true, thanks to our outrageously high local property taxes, our public school system employed a qualified instructor to give the sex talk for every parent in the district. I'd seen “health class” on his grade card, but it hadn't dawned on me that that was code for “sex ed,” which was taught by one of the no-nonsense coaches, who was as subtle as a daisy cutter bomb.

One week the heath class instructor sent a note home that read: “Next week we'll be following our sexual education curriculum. Don't be shocked if your ninth grader brings up how to use a latex dam.”

How dare they usurp my parental authority and responsibility? some parents probably thought, but my immediate reaction was what's a latex dam and what was the matter with the old-fashioned concrete kind?