So you think things maybe got better as I got older? Think again!
You’d
think as I got older that my parents may have lightened up in regards to sex,
but unfortunately that wasn't the case. In many ways, it only got worse and that only
added to my fear of it. I suppose I brought it on myself by continuing to live
under their roof, but as a young college student I just wasn’t emotionally ready to move
out. To compound the problem, my father had a rule that once you left home, you
couldn’t come back. That rule even applied to going to college away and living in
the dorms. I tried to explain to him that the dorms closed in the summer,
holidays, etc. but he refused to believe that.
“You
mean to tell me that every single kid goes home?” he asked.
I
answered in the affirmative, but he just didn’t buy it. He hadn’t gone to college
after high school and had instead elected to join the Air Force. That skewed
his idea of what a dorm was. He thought of it more like the barracks he had
lived in.That meant I pretty much had to go to a local school. It turned out okay as I have nothing but fond memories of UMass-Lowell.
All right, that was a bit off track, so let's get back on the "sex is dirty" line. When
I was about nineteen and a sophomore in college, I got up on a late fall
Saturday morning and the old man was standing at the same big picture window where
a few short years earlier, my brother and I had seen the nude woman projected
on the drive-in screen.
“Hmmm,”
he said, between sips of black coffee.
“What’s
so interesting?” I asked, thinking maybe there was some wild animal on the lawn or the neighbors were getting a new washing machine. Something innocent. No such luck.
“It’s
funny, but the way the light is hitting your windshield, I could swear I can
see a pair of bare foot prints on it."
I
felt my stomach immediately drop. The previous night I had gone out with a girl
from work who wasn’t exactly a bastion of virtue. I used to give her rides home from work as she lived near me and had no clue she was interested in me until one night she leaned over and stuck her tongue in my ear. That led to a date and after seeing a movie, we’d gone up to Fort Hill in
nearby Lowell, which was a well-known place for young lovers to be alone. In
those days, you could drive to the top of the darkened hill and park so you
could look out over the city lights. I’d bet a good number of local kids were
conceived on those heights over the years. Today they have it blocked off because there were probably too many problems up there for the local cops.
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I
tried to play it cool with my Dad and looked out the window and just said “hmmmm, that’s
weird.”
I attempted to retreat back to my bedroom, but he wasn’t done.
“Why
would you let someone put her bare feet up on the windshield like that?” he
asked. “It’s certainly an odd position to sit.”
I
tried to think of a good answer, but just like when my mother had busted my brother and
I looking at the drive-in screen years earlier, all I could say was “um…it’s
um…”
“Yeah,
you need to get your ass dressed and take your car to the car wash before your
mother sees that…and don’t ever get a frigging girl pregnant or you’ll ruin
your frigging life.”
The interior of my Horizon...not much room to "move." |
I
did exactly as he asked and we never talked about it again.
The height of the “insanely Catholic” syndrome occurred the summer between
my sophomore and junior year of college. I had met a girl at school the
previous fall that became my “steady” (and we really didn’t use that word in
the Eighties, but it was an apt description of our relationship) and my mother wasn’t pleased. In her mind, no girl was good enough for me and I
made the mistake of bringing her around my family, which added to my stress.
In
June of that summer, I had to go away for a month to Air Force ROTC field
training in California and left my car parked at my parents’ house. On Sundays,
we were allowed to call home and my father picked up the phone and the
discussion went something like this:
“When
you get home, we’re going to have a discussion about what we found in your
car,” said my father, in the same tone that once led to the Tandy leather belt
coming out to play.
Now
keep in mind that during the four weeks of field training, they keep you
utterly exhausted and under heavy pressure. They do this to make sure you’re
able to deal with stress as a future Air Force officer. My brain wasn’t exactly working
at peak capacity and it didn’t initially register what he was talking about.
Then
suddenly it hit me and I knew I was in deep shit.
Neither
my girlfriend nor I had our own place, so when we could, we got a cheap motel
somewhere for a night of “alone time.” When there wasn’t money for that, the
Plymouth Horizon had to make due and I kept a stash of condoms hidden deep in a Rush
cassette case at the very bottom of my glove box. I’m talking buried deep
beneath the owner’s manual, registration, insurance, box of tissues, pack of
gum, etc. Somehow my parents had found the condoms and instead of being glad
that I was being responsible or even ignoring it, went absolutely crazy…because after all, sex was
dirty and I was brought up better than that...
After
my brief discussion with my father, I immediately called my girlfriend who
informed me that my mother had called her to go out to lunch. My mom wanted to
“get to know her better.”
To
quote Admiral Ackbar from Return of the Jedi, “It’s a Trap!”
I
warned my girlfriend, but being a few years older than me, she said she’d
handle it. The lunch happened and once the food came, the discussion turned to
this:
“So,
you’re having sex with my son,” my mother announced between bites of her chicken tenders.
My
girlfriend told me she didn’t even know what to say, even though she knew it was coming. If I had been in her shoes, I may have gotten up and walked out. This girl had long term thoughts about our
relationship though, so she endured the lecture out of respect for her possible future
mother in law. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she broke up with me after that,
but thankfully she didn’t hold it against me.
When
I got back from California, my parents were waiting for me at the airport and I
heard nothing but a lecture all the way home, a forty minute ride. Nothing said
about being proud that I’d graduated in the top ten percent at field training,
nothing about me being home safe and sound, nope; it was all about the condoms
and being disappointed, blah, blah, blah.
They
claimed that I had gotten a car insurance bill while away so they were looking
for my proof of insurance, which I knew was right on top of the glove box with
my registration. It was a lame lie, but my mother especially always thought she
was smarter than me. When I was younger, if I said something she didn’t hear
she’d say,
“I
know what you said, tell me what you said.”
That
worked until I was about eleven, but she continued to use it.
After
they were done talking, I told them I was twenty years old and it was none of
their business. I added that when they were my age, they’d already had me. My
mother was incensed that I’d dared to talk back and her response was that no
they hadn’t.
“You
were nineteen when I was born,” I said. “That means you were eighteen when you
got pregnant.”
“No,
I wasn’t,” she adamantly responded.
“I
can do the math,” I said.
“Don’t
argue with your mother,” my father said, jumping in.
It
didn’t matter how old I was, didn’t matter that I was in college, and didn’t
even matter that I’d never done it in their house…because sex was dirty.
You’d
have thought my younger brother would have learned from that, but I’ll give you
one more example of the sexually uptight insanity. When I was about twenty-one,
my seventeen year old brother was dating the women whom he ended up marrying
years later. I'm sure my parents were suspicious about their um, "activities," and at one time my mother nearly caught them in the act. I know because I had to hear about it for a week as she tried to pry information out of me to confirm her suspicions. My brother and I didn't really get along back then, but there was no way I was stabbing him in the back that way.
Not
long after, the septic tank started to back up and began leaking in the
driveway. My parents’ driveway had never been paved so my father asked my
brother and me to help him dig up the pipe. It was a brutally hot summer day
and it took us about an hour to find the line. We soon learned that it was
never buried deep enough and over the years the weight of cars driving over it
and frost heaves had crushed the pipe.
As
we exposed the line, we found the break and along with it a huge wade of stuff
that had been flushed down the toilet. My father grabbed a shovel and moved the
toilet paper and other assorted things in the wad around, like he was looking
for something. I stood back sipping a cold beer, which I knew annoyed my father
since he didn’t drink, and watched as he lifted up the shovel for us to see. On
the end was a used condom.
His
face turned bright red and at first I worried that he was going to blame me.
Fortunately, I always had a reputation of telling my parents the truth and my
brother…well, not so much. When they had found my condoms the summer before, I
had told them I never did it in their house (which I will neither confirm or deny) so immediately my brother was blamed.
He began backing away and my father proceeded to chase him around the yard
with the shovel yelling, “you little sonovabitch!” I just sat back laughing,
finished my beer and watched the show.
My
younger brother was a severe disappointment…because of course sex was dirty and they
had indeed taught him better than that...
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