My father’s sex talk with me was very brief. He said,
“You have a penis, and you stick that in a girl’s vagina, and you ejaculate sperm, and that’s what makes babies. You got that?”
I got it. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about, but I got it. He didn’t want any questions, and he especially didn’t want any trouble. I didn’t have much sex in high school.
When my older brother went to college, my father’s parting advice for him was:
“If you get a girl pregnant, I’ll cut your balls off.”
When I went to college, there was, apparently no need for such advice. In fact, I think my father was so concerned that he had frightened me off girls, that he went out of his way to introduce me to girls in the dorm. Now, how is that for good luck? First day of college, I’m surrounded by rich, intelligent, beautiful young women from all over America, especially Long Island, and my father, wearing soiled, pink seersucker trousers and a jacket embroidered with a softball team’s nickname, “The Ball Blasters”, is cruising the dorm, introducing me. I must have seemed like quite the catch. My college social life played out as one might expect. Luckily, the university’s androgynous society met in our dorm on the second Tuesday of every month, so it wasn’t as if I was a total outcast.
Oh, and to top it off, most of the upper classmen on our dorm were born again Christians who had decided to stay in the dorm so that they could pray together in the evenings. The one guy who had a fake ID would only use it to buy communion wine.
I met my wife through a catalog, long before that was the popular thing it is today. Unfortunately, I ordered mine before the women of eastern Europe were desperate, and so she doesn’t do a damn thing I say. She doesn’t even make a decent cabbage roll, and if you’re going to be married to a woman with thick ankles who wears a babushka to bed, she damn well better make a decent cabbage roll. At least that’s what I think.
Now my own son is 13, and it’s time for his talk. Luckily, The Family Guy and South Park have removed most of the mystery for him. I take solace in the fact that if he happens to know what a rusty trombone is, he didn’t hear it from me.