It’s Time to Have “The Talk”
Next week my older son turns 13. To rephrase that, in a few days I’ll be the father of a teenager. Even as I type those words, I can’t wrap my brain around them. It’s as if I’m not writing about myself but in someone else’s voice, like if I’d said “my vagina” or “in my career as a fighter pilot” or “that time I gave up drinking.” It just feels like “My kid is a teenager” isn’t something I should be saying.
This is another one of those moments life hands you to remind you there’s no rewind button as we travel through this veil of tears. I’ve said before that getting older isn’t something you do a day at a time. Nor does it come all at once and one day you find yourself wearing a hat while hunched over the steering wheel on your way to catch the Early Bird Special at the Ft. Myers Waffle House. Age comes at you in mileposts. The first time you realize you’re never going to be a pro athlete, you become a little bit older. Or the first time a guy you saw play as a rookie retires. Or when you watch the New Year’s Day outdoor hockey game and you realize you recognize more of the old guys who are there for the ceremonial puck drop than you do the guys who are actually playing in the game. And the day you have a 13 year old kid, you’re definitely not the same age you were when you went to bed the night before.
So yeah, this is problematic for me. Frankly I’ve been dreading this day for... let’s see... 13 years and 9 months. Not just because it means I’m older, which it does. But for two other, more important reasons:
1. I hate teenagers. They’re awkward, obnoxious, hormonally-charged, self-centered little maniacs. I hated teenagers when I was one.
2. A long time ago I decided that 13 was the age when my son and I would have “The Talk.”
As in “THE Talk.” The big one. The facts of life talk. What in a simpler time they called the Birds & the Bees. The dreaded, awful, but unavoidable Eugene Levy-with-a-paper-bag-full-of-skin-mags-having-a-sitdown-with-Jason Biggs Sex Talk.
As the day’s been approaching, I’ve tried to pawn the job off on my Beautiful Trophy Wife, with no success. In fact she was incredulous when I suggested she do it. “ME?! You want ME to talk to him? You’re his father! I can’t talk to him about this stuff!” So I said “Hey, at least you’re a responsible adult. You know me better than anyone. You’re well aware of the utter depravity swirling around inside my head. Do you really want me to flip the pop top on all that debauchery I keep bottled up and expose your baby to it? It would be like breaking the Seventh Seal and unleashing hell. What kind of a mother are you?” But it was a non-starter. This job is all mine.
I suppose to a lot of you, this sounds ridiculous. That a guy who writes for the world’s foremost smutty sports newspaper and website shouldn’t make such a big deal out of telling his kid the facts of life. And I do have friends who’ve said they always had open and frank discussions about sex with their parents, but I’m simply not wired like that. My father died when I was little. My mother was old school Irish who raised us in the philosophy that everyone on Earth has certain wants, needs, desires and natural bodily functions, and we were to treat them... all of them... with the same degree of shame and mortified embarrassment. To the day that sainted woman went on to her great reward, we couldn’t sit through a feminine protection commercial together without desperately trying to talk over it awkwardly and nervously the way God intended.
I’m not kidding myself that my kid doesn’t already know pretty much everything. It’s well documented that our school buses are all rolling yellow whorehouses and our middle schools are all Sodom & Gomorrahs with morning announcements and English Muffin Pizza Fridays. That America’s schools are one big blow job fest. Blow jobs on the bus, blow jobs under the stairwells, blow jobs in the locker room. So many blow jobs it’s a wonder any teenage girl in the country has the time to learn math any more. (And if you’ve seen one try to make change at a register lately you know she hasn’t.)
So yeah, I could probably skip out on the whole affair and feel pretty confident that he’s going to figure it out the way I did, which was through friends, TV and the internet. OK, we didn’t have the internet then, but we had our version of it, which we called “your older brother’s Penthouse stash.” But I really don’t want my kid piecing little factoids together out of Penthouse Forum letters the way I did. I don’t need him growing up thinking that every guy who ever has sex is a tall, muscular, good-looking student at a large college in the Northeast who has 10 inches of throbbing manhood. In fact, if he could avoid the phrase “throbbing manhood” altogether that would pretty much suffice with me. Nor do I want him getting this stuff only from his friends, since I know these kids, having coached them for years in various sports. And I don’t want some kid who can’t learn a proper 3-point stance being the chief architect of my son’s sexual future. Especially since there are times in sex when a good 3-point stance can come in handy.
I think every kid growing up has that one friend he gets all his information from. That one kid savvy and mature enough to cobble together all the sexual facts and lay them out for you. Typically that friend has older siblings who fill him in and he passes along the knowledge. In my case, it was my friend Larry. Larry was, and still is, a hippie. The last time I saw him was a class reunion and he still had the long hair, a Fu Manchu, a leather vest and a giant peace sign belt buckle, which is exactly how I remember him when we were in 6th grade. Larry had pretty liberal parents and an older, hippie chick sister. When I was 12 I slept over his house and he broke out a porn flick belonging to his dad that he’d found. Notice I didn’t say “video” because it wasn’t one. This was an actual movie, which he played on a projector onto a bed sheet hung on his door. Just like my family used to with my dad’s movie projector, except he collected Rocky Marciano boxing movies, not boy-boy-girl threesome films. I’m not sure I knew exactly what was going on in Larry’s dad’s cinematic masterpiece, but I certainly haven’t forgotten it. All the Algebra and Calculus I studied has faded from memory and I can’t speak a word of the German I took for three years, but every frame of that ancient porn is indelibly burned in my memory like the Zapruder film.
I don’t mean to suggest I’m going to show my kid porn as part of The Talk. Hell no. Like I admitted to earlier, I’m pretty sexually immature and being exposed to Paleolithic porn during my formative years is probably a contributing factor. No, the speech alone will be agony enough without making it a PowerPoint presentation. I might later on open up the video vault to start showing him some of the movies I’ve been keeping from him, as examples of what we discussed. “Caddyshack” for example, to point out the dangers of sleeping with sluts like Lacey Underalls and going bareback with annoying girls with fake Irish accents. The “All in the Family” episode where Edith goes through menopause would be helpful. As would “Slapshot” with Suzanne Hanrahan to illustrate bisexuality in women. So opening up a world of great R-rated movies I’ve been sheltering him from is an obvious benefit.
The thing is, I don’t even know where to begin The Talk. It’s not like you wake your kid up, say “Happy Birthday, pal. Say, have I ever told you about the clitoris?...” These things have to be done subtlely. One of the great sports books ever is “Boys of Summer” by Roger Kahn. It’s his memoirs of growing up in Brooklyn as a Dodger fan. When he was a kid it seems Mrs. Kahn was all over Mr. Kahn about having The Talk with li’l Rog. So the old man was hitting grounders to him one day, called him into home plate, lit a cigarette and began “There’s something you need to know. Women bleed once a month from their private areas...” while the kid listened dumbfounded and mom looked on from the kitchen window. Finally the dad said “OK, you got it? Good. Now, get back out there, keep your head down and your glove on the ground...” That pretty much is my blueprint.
So this is it. It can’t be avoided any longer. Like college boards and job interviews and prostate exams, the sex talk with your kid is inevitable and you’ve just got to man up and get through it. Somehow though, 13 years just wasn’t enough time to prepare myself for it. I mean, he’s a bright kid and probably mature enough to handle it. I just don’t see any way that I am. Maybe I’ll just leave him a copy of Barstool and let him figure it out.