Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down (26 page)

My wife thinks the only fair system would be if, every time the woman had a contraction, she got to hit her husband on the body part of her choice with a ball-peen hammer. Of course, she is kidding. But only because her contractions have not yet started.

We’ve been going to childbirth classes, which involve sitting in a classroom filled with expectant couples and a mounting sense of dread. The teacher usually starts with a scientific discussion of childbirth, in which she shows us various diagrams and models to give us an idea of what will be happening when the Big Moment arrives. In my opinion, the most informative way to do this would be to hold up a bowling ball and a drinking straw, and say:

“Basically, THIS has to go through THIS. Ha ha!”

But our teacher keeps it fairly technical. After a while, we’re starting to feel confident about this childbirth thing. We’re thinking, “OK, all that has to happen is the cervix has to dilate to 10 centimeters! How hard can that be? I wonder what a cervix is? Also, what’s a centimeter?”

So we’re pondering these abstract questions and maybe thinking about what we’re going to have for dinner later, when suddenly, with no warning, the teacher turns out the lights and shows a horror movie.

Oh, it starts out innocently enough: There’s a nice couple consisting of a woman who is pregnant and a man who is supportive-looking and who generally has a beard. They seem happy, but you just know she’s going to go into labor. You want to stop her. It’s exactly like those scary movies where the heroine goes down into the basement, and you want to shout, “DON’T GO DOWN INTO THE BASEMENT!” except in the childbirth class you want to shout, “DON’T GO INTO LABOR!”

But she always does go into labor. It seems to last a LOT longer than necessary. Hours turn into days, and still she is in labor. Outside her window, the seasons change. Her doctor grows old and gray and is eventually replaced by a new doctor, and STILL this poor woman is in labor. Her husband keeps telling her she’s doing great, but you can tell from her expression that he’s very lucky she doesn’t have a ball-peen hammer.

Eventually, she becomes so deranged that she apparently does not even notice that there is a cameraperson shooting extreme footage of … OK, let’s just say that it is not her most flattering angle.

When the woman gets to approximately her 15th year of labor, she begins making noises that you rarely hear outside of nature documentaries, and her husband edges back a little bit in case she gets her hands on a scalpel. The movie now becomes very explicit, causing the entire childbirth class to go into a mass cringe, all of us hunched up
and involuntarily protecting as many of our body parts as possible. I use this time to practice my squinting, which is the most important thing the husband learns in childbirth class. I use a special Lamaze squinting technique that enables me to prevent virtually all rays of light from penetrating my eyeballs.

When the woman in the movie makes a noise identical to what you’d hear if a live yak went through a garlic press, I unsquint just enough to see it happen—the Blessed Event, the timeless miracle that makes the whole thing worthwhile:

An alien bursting out of the woman’s chest cavity.

No, seriously, what happens is that the woman has a baby, via a process that makes what happened in
Alien
look like an episode of
Teletubbies
. Then our childbirth-class teacher turns the lights on, and the pregnant women all turn to face their husbands, and they all have the same facial expression, which says: “This is NOT fair.”

We husbands respond by smiling supportively and patting their arms in a reassuring manner. Because we’re sure they’re going to do great.

I
am a hearty, seafaring type of individual, so recently I spent a week faring around the sea aboard the largest cruise ship in the world that has not yet hit an iceberg. It is called the
Voyager
, and it weighs 140,000 tons, which is approximately the amount I ate in desserts alone.

The
Voyager
sails out of Miami every week carrying 3,200 passengers determined to relax or die trying. The ship has (I am not making any of this up) an ice-skating rink, a large theater, a shopping mall, a rock-climbing wall, and a nine-hole miniature golf course. We have come a long way indeed from the days when the Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic aboard the
Mayflower
, which—hard as it is to imagine today—had no skating rink and only four golf holes.

While aboard the ship, we passengers engaged in a wide range of traditional cruise-ship activities, including eating breakfast, snacking, eating lunch, drinking complex rum-based beverages while lying on deck absorbing solar radiation until we glowed like exit signs, snacking some more, eating dinner, eating more snacks, and passing out face-down in the pâté section of the midnight buffet.

Needless to say I did not attempt to climb the rock wall, which is good because the resulting disaster would have made for a chilling newspaper headline:

The only stressful part of our shipboard routine was looking at photographs of ourselves. When you’re on a cruise, photographers constantly pop up and take pictures of you; they put these on display in hopes that you’ll buy them as souvenirs. At night, my wife and I would join the throng of passengers looking through the photos, hoping to find a nice flattering shot of ourselves, and then suddenly—YIKES—we’d be confronted with this terrifying image of two bloated, bright-red, slug-like bodies with OUR FACES. Jabba and Mrs. Hutt go to sea!

When every passenger had attained roughly the same body weight as a Buick Riviera, the ship would stop at a Caribbean island, and the passengers would waddle ashore to experience the traditional local culture, by which I mean shop for European jewelry and watches. I frankly don’t know why it makes economic sense for a tourist from Montana to fly to Miami, get on a ship, and sail to Jamaica for the purpose of purchasing a watch made in Switzerland, but apparently it does, because shopping is very important to cruise passengers.

If these people ever get to Mars, they WILL expect to find jewelry stores.

The other thing you do when your ship is in port is take guided tours to Local Points of Interest. Under international law, every tour group must include one tourist who has the IQ of sod. In Jamaica, we toured a plantation, and our group included a woman whose brain operated on some kind of tape delay, as we see from this typical exchange between her and our guide:

The woman repeated to Frank virtually everything the guide said. One day he will kill her with a kitchen appliance.

But I am proud to say that the winner of the award for Biggest Tourist Doofus was: me. What happened was, during the tour, a man demonstrated how he could climb a coconut tree using only a small rope made from twisted banana fibers. When he came down, he showed me the rope, and I, out of politeness, pretended to be interested in it, although in fact it was, basically, a rope. The man handed it to me and suggested I might want to “take it home to the kids.” I frankly doubted that any modern Nintendo-raised American child would be thrilled by such a gift. (“Look, Timmy! A rope!”) But I pretended to be grateful.

Then the man told me that such ropes USUALLY sell for $15 (he did not say where), but he would let it go for $10. And so, unable to figure out how to escape, I gave him $10. I imagine the other plantation workers laughed far into the night when he told them. (“He gave you $10 for the ROPE?” “Yes! He must be even stupider than the tape-delay woman!”)

But don’t get me wrong: I truly enjoyed the cruise. It was fun and relaxing, and it gave me a rare chance, amid all the hustle and bustle of my busy life, to pick up a substantial amount of body mass. Cruising is also romantic, so let me just say this to you couples out there: If you’re looking for a way to rekindle the flame in your relationship, I’ll sell you my rope.

A
s a professional newspaper columnist with both medical AND dental benefits, I receive many letters from people who would like to get into my line of work.

“Dear Dave,” they write. “I’m sick of my boring dead-end job as a (lawyer, teacher, office worker, Tipper Gore). How do I develop the skills I need to obtain a job like yours, where you have an opportunity to make a difference, even though you never actually do?”

OK, then: Today I’m going to take you “behind the scenes” here at Dave Barry Inc., and reveal, step-by-step, exactly how I write a column:

Step One is to come up with a topic. I am always thinking about possible topics, from the moment my alarm goes off at 6
A.M
., through the moment I actually get out of the bed, at around 10:15. During that period I take a series of decompression naps while monitoring the morning TV news shows to find out what the news is. Unfortunately, the morning news shows no longer show the news: They’re too busy showing the crowd of people who stand around outside the TV studio for hours on end waving at the camera and holding signs that say: “HI!” Evidently these people are too stupid to operate telephones, and this is the only way they have to communicate with their families or ward attendants back home. Sometimes the TV personalities go outside; I always hope that they’ll point firearms at the sign-holders and yell, “GO HOME,” but instead they ask the sign-holders where they’re from. The fascinating answers never fail to amaze and delight everybody (“
Ohio??
Great!!”).

So I have no column topic when I emerge from the bedroom to fix myself a hearty breakfast of coffee with extra coffee. My next step is to look through the daily newspaper, which I have found to be an invaluable and amazingly rich source of advertisements for women’s underwear. Every other page has an ad featuring female models in lingerie; you get the impression, from newspapers, that at least 80 percent
of the Gross National Product is brassieres. Why? Do women really need to be sold on the concept of underwear? Do they smack their foreheads and go, “THAT’S what I need! Something under my clothing!”?

But you can’t write a professional column about women’s underwear. You need a topic with some “meat” to it, such as the U.S. Trade Deficit, which is an important issue that the newspaper often puts next to the brassiere ads. And so, with this topic in mind, I head for my home office, which is an area that I would estimate, for tax purposes, covers 94 percent of the total square footage of my home.

I work at home because, as a professional writer, I find that a solitary environment enables me, whenever the muse strikes, to clip my toenails. This particular muse strikes more often than a French labor union. I’ll be pondering the Trade Deficit, and I’ll glance at my toenails and think, “Hey! Those babies have grown at LEAST three-thousandths of an inch since I last clipped them!” So I grab the clippers, which I always keep handy, and soon I’m hard at work. All your top writers do this. If you don’t believe me, go up to, say, Norman Mailer, and have some friends hold him down while you remove his shoes and socks. If his toenails aren’t trimmed to the base, I’ll pay you $10. I’ll need photographs.

Another reason why creative individuals prefer to work at home, as opposed to an office, is that when you need to scratch yourself, you don’t have to sneak behind the copying machine and settle for a hasty grope. At home, you can rear back and assault the affected region with both hands, or, if you want, gardening implements.

But you cannot scratch yourself forever. You are not a professional baseball player; you are a newspaper columnist, and sooner or later you have to “knuckle down” and get to work on the task at hand, which is: lunch.

After lunch it’s time to get back to thinking about the Trade Deficit. The key, with a complex issue like this, is: research. A professional newspaper column has to be 800 words long, which is why I cannot
say it enough: research, research, research. Among the questions that need to be answered are: What, exactly, IS the “Trade Deficit”? For this kind of technical detail, I get on the telephone to my Research Assistant, Judi Smith, a wealth of information.

“Judi,” I say, “how come there are so many newspaper ads for women’s underwear?”

“I think because men like to look at women in brassieres,” she replies.

My wife, who also works at home and is listening to this discussion, notes: “All those ads look the same.”

Both my wife and Judi agree that nobody ever buys a bra from an ad. It frankly makes me wonder if this could be a contributing factor to the Trade Deficit. Somebody should think about this. I’d do it, but these toenails are not getting any shorter.