“Then I will surely bleed from these welts.”
It was all I could do not to laugh. Whether she used her hand, a belt, or a switch, she didn’t have it in her heart to spank hard. I remember one time she whipped me and my sister, Jenny. Afterward we started up the stairs and broke into laughter. My dad heard it and told us to come back down. Nobody laughed the next time up the stairs. Big Jim could wear out your ass. He was like a gunslinger. He could do that Magic Dad thing, where he’d hold his hands at his side, reach, unbuckle his belt, pull it off and have it doubled over in one hand in less than two seconds.
Nowadays you can’t spank your children in front of other people, which is why my wife and I stay home all the time. Seriously, I guess they have to implement these rules for the people who go overboard. We have to be concerned. But I certainly don’t think a swat scarred me. Look at how normal I am! Most of us grew up with corporal punishment. Now it’s a time-out. You go sit in your room with the door closed. Tough life. That’s what I wanted to do.
“Oh darn, I’ve got to go sit in my room for five minutes. Maybe I better check out these toys. They look lonely.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’d rather not whack the kid on the bottom. Only once. Lightly. As if a gentle breeze were wafting by. When I have to, I feel bad about it. Our parents were right: It hurts them more than it hurt us. My fingers always sting for a few minutes.
Kids think nothing of manipulating their parents. It’s just another line in their job description. When I put my daughter to bed I tell her we’re going to read two books. As we start on the second she will say, “You know, Daddy, I love you soooooo much. Can we read three books tonight?”
“All right, three books.”
Three hours later I’ve got on my heavy coat and I’m just coming back from the public library.
If there are two parents present, the kid will play them off each other. They figure out which parent they’re most in trouble with and then they cozy up to the other. Of course, as a parent you’ve got to take advantage of that love whether it’s real or not.
“Damn right your mother’s crazy. It’s you and me, honey.”
When a child wants something their most effective tool is whining. I don’t know a parent who would not take a million dollars for their four-year-old after a trip down the cereal aisle at the supermarket. It’s like running the gauntlet: shooting the rapids and squealing like a pig. What’s worse is that by four they already know all the cereal brands—especially the sugared varieties—as well as the jingle tunes. If only they’d one day pay that much attention to their homework.
Kids whine when they don’t get something they want.
“Can I have a Popsicle?”
“No, it’s before dinner.”
“Wahhh…”
You get so sick so quick that you give in. You’re not supposed to, but they wear you down. It’s like basic training.
I think adults should employ this technique more often. Why give it up just because you’ve left childhood behind?
“You know, John, I only like you as a friend.”
“Wahhh…I don’t want you to like me as a friend, I want you to sleep with me one time…”
“But…”
“Wahhh.”
“Okay. Alright. Once! One time I’ll sleep with you.”
All new parents eventually realize that they are just like their own parents, only, they hope, different. All those things that we swore when we were thirteen years old that we were never going to say to our children, just blurt from our mouths. Then we look in the mirror and think, “Oh my God, I just said ’Because I said so.’ I can’t believe I said that.”
But I also found that as soon as I had kids, I appreciated my own parents a lot more. I started calling my mom and dad regularly. Suddenly I understood the sacrifices they had made. Not only financially, but timewise. Just between wiping my butt and my nose and changing my clothes, they spent a lot of man/woman hours getting me grown.
The number one parent complaint in the world is “I never have any time for myself.” Why is this? Simple. All our lives we’ve been given bad information. Since we were five years old, we’ve been told, “Don’t act like a baby. Don’t act like a kid.” I think if you would act like a kid you could have a lot of time to yourself. Say you’re introduced to somebody you’ve never met before. Act like a kid. Put your finger in your nose. You never have to worry about this person calling you, writing to you, or wanting to spend time with you again. Go to somebody’s house and jump on the bed. He’ll never invite you back. Tell your boss you can’t work and that you’re scared because there’s a monster in the break room. You’re going to have plenty of time for yourself until your unemployment runs out.
Before we were married, Gregg and I used to sit around in the morning and read the paper over breakfast. Before we had kids, I loved it when Gregg could come back to bed in the morning after feeding the pets, and it was playtime. Now I love it when my wife gets up with the baby and lets me sleep.
Kids change everything. Now when we drive down the street and Gregg sees a billboard with a woman wearing a bikini, she will say, “Honey, I used to look like that before I had kids.”
So I will say, “That’s why you had kids, honey.”
Women are never happy with their bodies afterward. Men should probably have kids because we don’t care about how we look the same way women do. Stretch marks on our butts? We never look at our butts. There’s not a guy in the world who looks at his posterior—or will admit it. I just assume it’s there because my pants haven’t fallen down.
I learned something about men’s butts when my wife sent my brother and me to the Atlanta Braves Fantasy Camp for Christmas, where guys get to live out their major league dream and play with the real players. It cost $3,500, and you have to be at least thirty to go. Most of the guys were doctors and lawyers. Most were also between fifty and sixty years old. At the end of the week one of the Braves asked me “Did you learn anything?”
I said, “Yes, I did. I have learned there is nothing uglier than an old man’s ass.” Looks like somebody hung a bean bag chair over a clothesline. I suppose this is inevitable. Unlike our wives’, our butts don’t get fat. The bottom half just disappears. It’s like an alien ass. I’ve never seen an alien ass, but I’m assuming that’s what one would look like. You can’t look at one and not shudder, I know that for a fact. When I walked through that locker room, every BA I’d ever flashed came back to haunt me. The only thing worse that I’ve ever seen was my grandmother naked. Purely by accident. I will remember that vision until the day I die. Weeks later I’d still get full-body shivers. Nothing was in the right place. She looked like a bloodhound in a shower cap. I thought about it for a while and I decided it was God getting even with me for all the times in my life I tried to see women naked.
“Hey, Jeff, you want to see naked women? Huh? Here’s your grandma!”
The hardest part of Fantasy Camp was accepting how out of shape we were. Guys could still hit. Some could still throw a little bit. But nobody could run any more. You hit it to the wall and it’d be a bang-bang play at first. When I was seventeen my fantasy involved two redheads and a gallon of Cool Whip. When I first arrived at camp, my fantasy was to hit a triple. After four days my fantasy was to put my socks on by myself. Everybody was so sore. After two days the hotel sounded like a brothel. I’d walk down the hall and hear guys in their rooms going, “Ooo. OOO. OOOOO.”
“Hey, you got a girl in there?”
“No, I’m just taking my shirt off. Now I’m brushing my teeth.”
Onstage I talk about my vasectomy. This is not something I just invented to be funny, although sometimes I wish it were.
Before I got the procedure, I had to get counseling. The doctors think it’s a good idea. They want to make sure you know what you’re doing. Somehow, I don’t think dropping your pants for some guy with a razor is an impulse decision.
I didn’t really want to do it. Like a
ll guys I thought, “What if I want to have another family? You might call that a tradition with the Foxworthys. Or what if Gregg got hit by a bus tomorrow? Then I’d need to marry a gorgeous twenty-year-old and start all over again. Or I might get really adventurous and become one of those weird guys who have whole families in different towns and manage to split their time between both by telling their wives they are traveling for business.
“Gonna be on the road for half our married life, if it’s okay with you, dear.”
Of course, the idea of my vasectomy didn’t bother Gregg a bit. After two difficult pregnancies, she was all for it. She was properly sympathetic about what I was about to endure, but not about my other fears because the doctors had assured me that in most cases the procedure was reversible. Yeah right. All I need is to be forty-nine and have Gregg suddenly say, “I need another baby,” and not be able to answer the call.
Now that it’s a done deal, a friend told me that the only way to handle the dark wellspring of this mortifying trauma that still haunts me is to share my experience.
“Talk about it,” she said, “One day you’ll get over it.” So I use it in my act. It’s painful, but not as painful as listening to other men tell me stories that make me want to live in a deer stand for the rest of my life.
Here it is. You lie on a cold, stainless steel table. You’re not wearing pants. Right where you can see it—who’s sick idea is that?—is a tray with a razor, a hook, a soldering iron, and two large syringes. My brother-in-law, Richard, told me that when he got his cords cut, they used the soldering iron and discovered it wasn’t grounded.
The words “torture implements” and “no pants” don’t even belong in the same sentence. When I asked a friend about his vasectomy, he only got as far as the word “razor” before I felt a sudden pain in my package. I looked down and realized I had crossed and squeezed my legs together tighter than a torqued bolt. You could hold a million dollars in front of a guy and say, “I’ll give you all the money if you can just sit with both feet on the floor and listen to how it’s done,” and you’d never lose a penny. It’s just not possible. Even after the operation is complete and you’ve healed, reached retirement age, and started collecting Social Security, you’re never over the terror.
The anesthetic is local, though it seemed long distance to me. I got a shot in both sides of my scrotum to numb it. (The memory is so painful that it took me ten minutes just to type out the preceding sentence.) Meanwhile, I tried to make small talk with a doctor who reminded me of Buddy Hammond making his mom a change purse, while he kept talking about country music.
“Hey, you know who I really like?”
“Somebody with a high voice, I assume.”
I didn’t really feel the first shot. The second hit a nerve. That hurt so much that when I got home I couldn’t even use the remote control. Then my equipment went into hiding. I had to stick my finger up my butt and holler “Snake!” just to pee.
The operation is also embarrassing. For some reason, there’s a nurse in the room. I kept hoping she wouldn’t look at me. There is better-looking plumbing in the newborn room at the hospital.
The preop instructions say you have to bring a jockstrap with you. When you’re done, they pack the front full of gauze. I looked like Tom Jones in concert. Walking from the doctor’s office to the car, I got invited to three proms.
“Leave me alone, my wife’s waiting on me.”
While recovering I actually wanted to call people and get them to look at my bruises of many colors. No body part has ever been these colors before: yellow, green, mauve, taupe, black, purple. But don’t try to get any sympathy from your buddies. They always say, “Oh, it doesn’t really hurt.” They’re lying. But pretty soon you’re telling the same lie. The reason is that if you were dumb enough to fall for the whole deal, you want to get somebody else to fall for it.
The good thing was that when the pain really went away I felt like a sixteen-year-old. For the first time in my sexual life I didn’t have to worry about getting somebody pregnant. When my wife said, “The baby’s taking a nap,” I said, “Hey, the baby’s taking a nap! Perhaps you and I should take a nap.”
“Get away from me with that thing.”
Damn. Got a new one and can’t even use it.
Of course, there’s a good reason to endure such embarrassment and pain. The alternatives are worse. I’m not talking about unwanted children. You always want them. But other preventive methods make spontaneity fly out the window. IUD’s are a hassle. The pill causes some women to vomit pea soup, like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. I’ve got no problem with women hurling, but I hate it when the bed levitates halfway to the ceiling.
Contraceptive foam is the pits. That stuff is almost as effective as the pill yet it contains no ingredient that actually prevents pregnancy. The way it works is this: When you’re finished making love and you go to pee, it burns so bloody awfully that you feel like the star client at your local VD clinic. I felt as if I were engulfed in flames. Suddenly I didn’t want to have sex for another six months. When you only do it twice a year, the chance of conception is very low.
Six weeks after the vasectomy operation you’re supposed to take in a sample to the doctor. Then wait four months and take another. They give you two little cups to use. Someone knowing what you’re really doing in the bathroom takes all the thrill away. It’s humiliating, taking the cup into the doctor’s office and announcing to a full waiting room, “Hey, here’s my sperm sample.” I suppose it could have been worse. I might have had to do it in a little room at the doctor’s. How much time is appropriate to spend summoning the sample? If you’re back in forty seconds, they’ll talk about you. If you’re gone an hour, they’ll talk about you. Maybe I should have stayed an hour and then when I came out, said, “Sorry, the first four weren’t perfect, so I threw them away.”
I don’t feel that terrible about not having more kids. I used to want a son, bad, but it might be tough being my son. I’d relive all my sports fantasies and make his life miserable. I’d want him to be a football star and I’m afraid that at halftime, when all the other dads go to get hot chocolate, I’d be saying, “Sorry, fellas, I’ve got to stay. Eugene’s got a baton solo tonight.”
I worry about my daughters, too. I spent the first half of my life trying to get into girls’ knickers and I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to keep other guys out of theirs.
Hey, cut it out. This is no laughing matter.
When Cousins Marry
I believe in the family. I’ve always told stories about my relations and even used them as the inspiration for a Redneck joke or two…hundred. Without their example to draw on I might still be doing stand-up over Kroger’s intercom and checking stock in the backroom between “sets.”
I’m feeling kind of grateful and spiritual now, so I’d like to share with you what family means to me.
Your family is a pack of idiots whom you have to love. We exist on earth to love each other, and our family is the test. Family is different from friends. You can pick your friends. It’s easy to love your friends, because you pick them. But with family, God just sorts through the whole pile of souls and says, “This one will hate this one—okay, they’re brothers. This one will drive everyone crazy—she’ll be the aunt.” You just get stuck with these people, and most of them are nuts. You let family get away with behavior you wouldn’t put up with from your closest friends, let alone strangers. You love your family and hate them, fight with and fight for them. But in the end they’re all you’ve got.
There are no secrets in my family. It’s not that we don’t try to keep them, it’s just that my kin are the biggest bunch of blabbermouths in the world. To say, “Don’t tell anybody I told you this,” is to waste your breath. You might as well rent the Goodyear blimp and advertise.
“Don’t tell anybody I told you this, but the girl Cousin Jerry’s dating is four months’ pregnant.” Before the sun has set, some relative from Alaska will ca
ll and say, “We hear Jerry’s dating a girl with a hunchback and three six-year-olds.”
In my family they don’t even try to get it right.
The family reunion is your annual reminder about how weird your relations really are. Uncle Leonard has a bumper sticker on his bowling ball and is still upset that Gunsmoke was canceled. Aunt Ida is the state’s only female Elvis impersonator. Cousin Joanie’s talent in the local beauty pageant was making noises with her armpit. Her brother, Bradley, can eat a McDonald’s double cheeseburger in one bite. And what about Grandma, who starts every day by asking, “Anyone seen my teeth?” The notion that these people swim in the same gene pool as you is enough to make you quit dating your second cousin and stop calling your van the “Love Machine.”
On the other hand, some people look forward to family reunions, especially those who hope they will get to go after the parole board finally meets.
My maternal grandmother’s family, the Sheats, always holds their reunions at a campground on the south side of Atlanta. When I was a kid, everyone wore their Sunday best. The adults sang church songs while the kids played football. We’d always tear something, but the beating was still worth not having to sing.
My grandfather Camp’s family was also big on reunions, but that was because they all lived to be over a hundred years old. By then these folks didn’t have much to look forward to but the reunion and that time of day when the prunes kicked in. Fortunately they were funny people, though considering their advanced age and their digestive systems, they had to be very careful how hard they laughed.
The Foxworthy clan didn’t get together very often for reunions because our gatherings always ended in fights. Once we had all the relatives come down to Big Jim’s farm for the weekend. For a while things went well. Then we decided to go to a hayfield for a family softball game. This game included a couple of cousins, Ben and Richard, that Big Jim had never much liked. In the middle of the third inning my brother, Jay, slid into second base and Cousin Ben tagged him too hard, I guess. Big Jim was up next. When he got to second base, he threw a big hairy forearm at Ben. Next thing, everyone was brawling in the middle of the baseball diamond. Somehow I’m certain that God looked down on that spectacle and thought, “Why did I give these people the ability to reproduce?”
No Shirt, No Shoes...No Problem! Page 17