Sex is Dirty...or Why Lloyd Had No Game (Part I)

Today I'm starting a series of posts that I originally conceived as a book about growing up in the 80s. As I started writing, I realized I'd never have enough interesting material for an entire book and the best stuff had to do with my relationships with the opposite sex. 

So here's Part One for your reading pleasure. Feedback and comments are most certainly welcome. 

I've spent a lot of years trying to figure out my relationship with the opposite sex. After a failed marriage that was never all that great from the start (and I'm talking a fight on day one of our honeymoon), I really wanted to figure out where I'd gone wrong so I went back to the beginning. I realized as a younger man, there had been many missed opportunities with quality women; some of  whom I may have had ended sharing a long and fulfilling life with. For various reasons though, primarily me being clueless, I had always shied away from these opportunities. 

I was so clueless about girls growing up that unless they pretty much grabbed me and shoved their tongue down my throat (true story), I didn't get the message they were interested in me. Hell, back then they probably could have flown a banner over my house with our names in hearts and I may have not gotten it. 

The good news is I finally figured it out and am married to wonderful woman who loves me for who I am, despite my flaws and my life is finally where I always wanted it to be.

So why didn't I have game growing up? Why was I so intimidated by the opposite sex? Let me explain how it all started...

Sex was dirty; at least according to my parents. It was preached about so much that I think I actually became afraid of it. 

I grew up in a very strict Roman Catholic household; the kind where there was no meat on Fridays and you had to give up something for Lent. As an adult, I’ve pretty much given up Lent for Lent, but as a child it was supposed to be something you really enjoyed like soda, chocolate or comic books.  

I was also taught per the Catholic dogma that any type of sexual thoughts, idea, etc. outside of marriage were verboten. In a very limited way though my father talked about sex and it sort of went like this.

“Don’t have sex because you could get a broad knocked up and ruin your life.”

Yeah, thanks for the sage advice there, Pops. I heard this gem from the time I was about twelve until I was out of the house in my twenties. My Dad liked to talk in a way that he thought made him sound like the toughs he grew up with outside of Boston in the late fifties and early sixties. It seemed like a lot of men of his generation referred to women as “broads,” perhaps like his father called them “dames.” Either way, in the big picture it was probably good advice, but as I got older, I of course had other concerns.

Back in my old man’s day, if you got a venereal disease or “VD” for short, it’d burn when you peed, you’d scream, your mom would ask you what was the matter, you’d tell her a big spider scared you in the bathroom and then you’d go down to the doctor and get a shot of penicillin. In no time, it’d be cleared up and you’d move on to the next “broad.” At least that’s how I imagined it.  

Unfortunately in the Eighties, while we still had to worry about the dreaded syphilis and gonorrhea, relatively new diseases like herpes that lasted forever was front and center. AIDS also became a big thing during the decade but at that point, we were told it was a disease only gay men contracted so we didn’t worry about it.

Wait, don’t let me forget crabs, which was apparently also a thing people exchanged during sex. Much like AIDS, we never really worried about it because Hollywood (ala “The Last American Virgin”) taught us that if you stayed in a chlorine pool for long enough, you’d drown them. Unless you had a membership to the YMCA, none of us were smart enough to consider what would happen if you got crabs in the winter.

Anyway, so back to my Father’s advice. Get a girl pregnant? Hell, I was lucky if I got to second base for the early part of the decade…but I’ll get to that in the next post.

Sometime around age twelve, since Google hadn’t been invented yet, I finally got the nerve  to ask my parents where babies came from. If it had, I would have much preferred to have just looked it up instead of getting “the talk.” I knew where the guys on the street said kids came from, but I figured I should probably bring my parents in on the alleged big secret. Thankfully they never fed me the bullshit about “mommy swallowed a watermelon seed” or the infamous stork story. I knew other kids who were told that by their parents and they took a lot of shit for it at school.

My earliest recognition of sex was an absolute horror show. One night when I was about eight years old, I woke up and didn’t feel good. I went to tell my mother and walked in on my parents having “marital relations;” which is what my father told me they were doing. That was actually a pretty good answer for an eight year old and I moved on to the Red Sox, G.I. Joes and whatever else I was into at that age. It wasn’t until much later that I had an “aha” moment and realized what they were doing.

It was a few years later when my hormones started to kick in and I got a tingly feeling when I was around certain girls. I think it was my mother, who was sometimes (but not always) the safer of the two, that I posed the question to. She passed me off to my father and I remember his speech going something like this.

“When a husband and his wife get married, they get into bed and the man puts his penis inside her and she has a baby nine months later.”

He illustrated the point by drawing stick figures on a sheet of paper to represent the husband and wife. 

Not the actual picture, but pretty much what my Father drew

“Any questions?” he asked, a cigarette with a long ash dangling from the side of his mouth.

I could tell the old man was pretty proud of the way he’d handled “the talk” so I let it go. It actually sounded pretty gross at the time and I had tons of questions, but let them go for another time. I’d just figure it out on my own, which was probably a big mistake because five years later I was still trying to figure some of those things out. I'm not sure he'd have known how to answer some of them anyway.

“No, Dad,” I replied.

“Good…and don’t have sex because you could get a broad knocked up and ruin your life.” 

The fear was instilled in me and it all went downhill from there!
 

In the next installment, the teenage years start.