In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy (25 page)

My Pop Warner team decided to wait until the championship game to make the CHANGE from undefeated. Now that’s the look of growth.

TIME TO
CALL IT
A LIFE

I’ve always said, “Life is just the time between crapping yourself.” (I’m planning on trademarking that phrase and putting it on a series of inspirational posters.) I have a lot of thoughts about the beginning and the end of our time on this mortal coil.

I recently did a live show and invited my old partner Dr. Drew and my old roommate, Ralph Garman, now star of the
Kevin and Bean
morning show, to join us onstage. Ralph’s wife was pregnant at the time, Drew’s triplets were all grown up, and my twins were three and a half. But the one thing we all had in common was infertility. For some reason the gainfully employed non–drug abusers who look at marriage as a lifetime commitment, or at least until the youngest hits junior college, couldn’t figure out a way to shit out a kid without twenty trips to the fertility specialist. But if two dimwits hump in the back of a van in a Walmart parking lot, they can easily add a tenth to their brood of future addicts and welfare recipients. It seems that the higher the education level and tax bracket, the lower the sperm count. Whether you’re a fan of God or Darwin, what the fuck is the plan?

The couple that has to make sure their mullets don’t get tangled while they’re literally knocking boots can have a kid for the cost of a six-pack of Stroh’s. My kids cost me fifty grand. There were pills and injections for my wife, and I had to beat off into containers at facilities. Talk about killing something I love—it took all the majesty and romance out of having at myself while my wife was asleep in the next room.

You don’t realize that your balls have their own schedule until a doctor is telling you when to have sex and where to jack off. I would ask my wife, “Can’t I just beat off into Tupperware in the comfort of my own bathroom and then rush it to the place?” But the clinic was twenty-five minutes away and I guess the sperm is only good for twenty. (There are tube socks in my hamper that would beg to differ.) So I had to go to the clinic where they put you in that room with the hollow-core door that’s been undercut because they used to have shag carpet. You can hear the nurses clomping around outside and clucking like chickens. A tile floor, a hollow-core door, and an inch and a quarter of daylight underneath it actually act as an amplifier. It’s a good thing I had a lot of roommates and learned how to rub one out while they were twelve feet away fucking around making noise. They could be in the next room stabbing each other with fireplace pokers and I could still finish off. I’m a ninja when it comes to masturbating. I’m like a safecracker. I work quickly and I work alone.

At the clinic they offer you porn, and at first you have to pretend to be confused. “Hmm,
pornography
, you say. Don’t believe I know that word. It’s pictures of nude people? I was unaware of this innovation. Well, if you say so. I’ll try anything once. You’re the expert.” And it’s always the poorest selection. That basket of porn is like the kids’ plastic pumpkin a week after Halloween. The Reese’s, Snickers, and Almond Joy have been pilfered, and all that’s left are a few scattered Necco Wafers and a dog-eared
Hustler
with Seka on the cover. You end up beating off to chicks from the eighties with Nagel paintings behind them who died of a drug overdose ten years ago. My cock was insulted. The pocket in the seat in front of you on the Southwest flight has more jackable material in it than the porn basket at the fertility clinic.

We did a
Man Show
bit once where Jimmy and I went to one of these clinics. We were going to compare our sperm to see whose count was higher, but we also decided to race and see who could produce it the fastest. So we stood in the hallway, one of the producers, Beth Einhorn, hit a stopwatch, and we sprinted into our rooms. By the way, this was Beth’s first day, so it must have been bizarre to explain to her loved ones when they asked, “How was your first day on the new job?” “Oh, I timed two guys while they spunked into cups.” So it was essentially the cock against the clock. I came bursting out of the room three seconds before Jimmy, but that was only because he had the dignity to pull his pants up before exiting. We accounted for that and realized we were on exactly the same jizz clock. It’s like when women work together for long enough and their cycles sync up.

So years later, when my wife and I were trying to get pregnant, I’m at this fertility clinic and I know I can wrap this up pretty quickly. But I don’t want the nurse to watch me walk into the room, tie her shoe, and then see me walking out with a bucket of jizz. So I did that casual jack move, the one you see the guys from the gangbang porn doing. It’s the masturbation equivalent of the runner at the stoplight jogging in place to keep the heart rate up, or a Golden Gloves boxer whose fight isn’t for another hour shadowboxing. Cutting to the chase, my sperm were fine, my wife’s eggs were fine, and there was no reason we couldn’t get pregnant. A couple of months and some in vitro fertilization later, Lynette did eventually get pregnant with my twins, the boy and what’s-her-name.

This seems like the best place to recall a horrible yet hilarious moment in my life. It was my first night on
Dancing with the Stars
, and everyone was a bundle of nerves. Marissa Jaret Winokur, the chubby chick from
Hairspray
on Broadway, was one of the contestants, and she was especially anxious. She was taking the competition very seriously and she was due to dance last. The only thing more nerve-racking than dancing in front of twenty million people is pacing around for an hour and forty-five minutes waiting to do it. People were giving her stupid advice like “Have fun out there” and other shit that isn’t constructive: A) That’s not advice, and B) nobody has ever had fun because somebody yelled at them to have fun. After my dance, I left the stage and ran into a pacing, on-the-verge-of-throwing-up Marissa.

I could tell she was all up in her head, so I pulled her aside and thought I would offer some sage advice that would calm her nerves. I said, “You’re not going to have fun out there. You’re going to have an experience out there. Don’t run from it, or try to mask it with a shot of Patrón, embrace it. It’s a crazy rush.” Then I continued, “It’s like giving birth. It’s painful, it’s scary, but it’s life affirming. You don’t want to be passed-out and not experience the miracle of childbirth.” Then, like a moment out of an episode of
Curb Your Enthusiasm
, she immediately replied, “I had cervical cancer and both my ovaries removed. We have a surrogate that’s pregnant right now.” Another contestant, Penn Jillette, started laughing maniacally at what had just gone down. Visually it was surreal because she’s five foot one in heels and Penn Jillette with his dance shoes on is knocking on the door of seven feet. Plus he’s a comedian and a magician, so I thought they were screwing with me. I persisted, “No, seriously, are you sterile? Did you have your parts removed? No fallopian tubing at all?” She said yes, she was barren, it was like an ashtray down there. I had put my Capezio right in my mouth. I thought the whole childbirth thing was a great analogy, but I sent Marissa out to her first dance thinking about her long-lost ovaries instead of her paso doble.

I’m sure it would be little comfort to her, but being pregnant and giving birth is as big a pain in the ass as it is a pain in the vagina. The first thing that happens when you get pregnant is every dickhead tells you how it’s going to change your life. It’s not that big a deal. What is it with the worrywarts who want to talk you into being scared of shit? What do they get out of it? They’ll be like, “What about college? Better start saving now.” Let’s get the kid out of the uterus before we start trying to get him into Harvard. Or especially the guys who will say, “Forget your sex life. It’s gone. You might as well just rip your dick off and stab yourself in the eye with it.”

Then when it comes time to give birth, you’ll get a lot of idiots talking to you about “natural birth.” People will say, “You know, you don’t need to have a physician.” I understand I might not need one, but we do have them. These are the same jag-offs who say, “We can do dentistry without numbing.” Yeah, but you do have something called Novocain, right? Go get it. We’re not on a Civil War battlefield. Why are some kinds of progress good but other kinds bad? Tomorrow I’m leaving for New York to do a television show and meet the woman who’s editing this book and it’s going to take me five hours in the air, but according to a handful of nut jobs, I should take a covered wagon and eat my own leg on the Donner Pass. These natural birthers are right up there with the restore-your-foreskin people, who are just wackos who don’t give a fuck about restoring foreskin—they’re trying to restore a hole in their childhood by filling it with a cause. Getting so wrapped up in something that falls under the heading of Who Gives a Shit? means there are deep underlying psychological issues. Whether it’s natural birth, restoring foreskin, or toxin flushing through colonics, stop talking to me about it and start talking to a therapist.

Another aspect of our relentless androgynous culture is getting men involved in the whole birthing process. This happened to me. First they were like, “Hey, we have the sonogram. Here’s a picture of the kids. Keep it. They’ll get a kick out of it when they’re older.” I replied, “I don’t think they’ll care.” The woman said, “How could it hurt?” I shot back, “How could it help?” Did she think someday my son would be showing this to his high school football buddies? They looked like two hamsters in formaldehyde.

Why are men talked into being in the room during the birth? I would have preferred not to be in the room. First, it’s not a big room. It’s not a gymnasium or a blimp hanger. It’s small and cluttered with people and equipment. Do you need another jack-off standing around who doesn’t know what the fuck is going on? We have that policy across the board in life. You can’t mosey behind the counter of a McDonald’s and start making your own Big Mac. So why here? All they do in hospitals is tell you, “Excuse me, sir, you need to wait,” “You can’t go in there,” et cetera. Yet with that room, it’s “Come on down.” They might as well put western doors on that fucking room with a guy who looks like Jed Clampett saying, “Come on in, pull up a stool, sit a spell.”

Before you go into the OR for the C-section, they put you in a holding room where you nervously wait for go time. This was a medium-sized room with two beds and one bathroom. We were the only couple occupying it. As I was leaving the bathroom, I ran into the nurse, who told me in a rude tone, “Sir, that bathroom’s only for patients. Your bathroom’s down the hall.” I answered her the way I answer all shitheads with a pointless agenda: with a vacant stare and subtle “So what are you going to do?” Later on, she overheard me talking on the cell phone and calling her a bitch and had to swing by to make sure I knew she heard me. After the kids were born, some nervous coworkers came up and basically apologized for her, saying she did that with everyone, she’s not a nice person, and they don’t know what to do about her. I told them I had a novel idea—perhaps they should fire her ass. This was the most stressful day of my life, not counting the Rams’ first Super Bowl appearance, and I gotta have Fuckface Nightingale up my ass engaging in one of my least favorite behaviors—the lecture about the thing that has already happened and will never happen again. Hey cunt, I just emptied my bladder and we’re going down to the OR in the next twenty minutes, so unless I funnel a twelve-pack of Milwaukee’s Best, I doubt I’ll be heading back into the commode. And it’s not like I’m going to be back the following week with a new set of twins. I, with the help of my insurance, just gave your establishment thousands of dollars. Perhaps you could holster the stink-eye and get back to your first love … mercy killing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it is up to all of us to verbally abuse these douchenozzles. The more they’re humored, the more empowered they become and the worse society gets.

And then there’s cutting the cord. This story is a metaphor for my life. It’s another example of somebody trying to get me interested in something I’m not interested in and not taking no for an answer. “Would you like to cut the umbilical cord?” “No thanks, I’m cool.” “You’ll regret it if you don’t.” “I’ll take my chances.” “It’s a real important experience.” “Is the guy who normally cuts the umbilical cord not available? If so, tell me. If not, please shut the fuck up.” I’ve wasted at least a third of my life telling people no for the fifth time. I understand why they think it might be an important experience for me; what I don’t understand is what’s in it for them to convey that to me for the fifth time. And when did everyone buy into this notion that we had to start bonding with our kids at zygote? Here’s how you bond with your kids and imprint positive parental imagery: You be a good fucking parent. You take an interest in what your kids are interested in, you encourage them, you communicate with them, and you see if you can keep the beatings and the molestation to every other weekend. If cutting the cord created some kind of magical bond, then how come none of us have that with the doctor who cut our cords? Does anyone even know the name of the guy who cut their cord or where they are now? No. Why? Because we don’t give a shit. And do you think Bill Gates or Winston Churchill or Evel Knievel’s dads cut their cords? Fuck no. And they turned out pretty good.

Anyway, I told anyone who’d listen that not only did I not want to cut the cord, I didn’t even want to be in the building. I thought I’d be out in the parking lot handing out cigars. But the next thing you know, somebody handed me a pair of shears and said, “Start cutting.” I said, “But they already cut the umbilical cord.” We were standing six feet away over a clear plastic table. The guy said, “Oh, you don’t cut it when it’s attached. It’s just symbolic.” Now I was confused and pissed. The entire time assholes were telling me how important it was to cut the cord and I was saying I don’t want to be performing surgery on my wife, they neglected to mention the part where I was cutting a half inch off the cord after it had already been cut. I attempted to put the right-hand cutting shears into my left hand and almost dropped them onto my daughter’s eyeball in the process. I was, in the end, forced to cut my kids’ cords, and I can guarantee you that any of the unspoken good vibes that were created with my kids because of this act are far outweighed by the deep-seated resentment I have toward them for forcing me into it.