FatKidsLie

My girlfriend has a five year old son who decided to tell us how babies get into their mommy’s bellies. “The daddy puts it there with his balls!!!” he said with great enthusiasm while pointing to his own personal parts.

This is a little better than how I learned it’s done.

You see, when I was his age in 1985 there was a HUGE AIDS scare thing going on. There were commercials on TV even during the afternoon reruns of Diff’rent Strokes when kids were watching. Because it was THAT important. I guess. Since gradeschoolers in NYC were constantly boinking.

It just seemed that every other commercial was an AIDS or anti-drug PSA. I could be wrong, because I tend to exagerate in my mind and then eventually that egageration becomes the reality of my world. It isn’t totally the worst way to live, by the way. Since I have a firm memory of Lion-O High-fiveing me at a friend’s birthday party. And it was the REAL Lion-O. Not his uncle in a Lion-O costume.

Anyway… the AIDS commercials were fairly vague because god forbid you actually give real information to kids that they can use to learn the realities. So I was curious and I asked the one person who I knew knew EVERYthing.

My friend Charlie’s older brother. Who was in the fifth grade.

He was TWICE as old as me, and knew all the cheats and tricks in every Nintendo game. And he had a skateboard. And could do a little jump and that thing where you stomp on the back of it and it flips up and you can catch it and you look cool!!! He was the bestest!

So I asked him what AIDS was and he told me that it’s when you pee when you have sex. That’s how you catch AIDS. Also? If you let a dude look at you while you’re in the bathroom you can catch it too. Which is why Patrick McHeely used to try and jump up and peer over the stalls while I was pooping at school.

That, and I think he was disturbed.

I’m 30 years old. I have a girlfriend and a dog and my girlfriend has a dog. But there are some things that would make you question that.

Like when I’m home alone at night and I’ve just watched a scary movie from the 1980’s and I hear something and then I swear that there’s some sort of space pirate or zombie or the Red Guy from Legend or something in my closet or some sort of Sumarian demi-god living in my refrigerator or something. And we all know that the only thing that can defeat the Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krugers is Mommy.

It isn’t good enough that my girlfriend is a mommy, she can’t help me. The only one that can is MY mommy.

The problem is that I’m an adult, with my own home. And my mom doesn’t live here. In fact, right now she’s living in another country. So I have to get her on Skype and I take my laptop and put it under my bed so that the tentacle-rape monster can’t get me. She tells them to get out of there through a video conference.

The wonders of modern technology.

When I was a kid my niece was jealous that my little sister and I would spend time with my grandma. She wanted to spend a weekend with Grandma to show how everyone how cool she was… and prove that she’s the favorite great-grandchild.

Or something.

I’m not sure.

You see, Grandma was… gross. and scary.

She used to fall asleep, snoring and cursing in her sleep while smoking and watching the “fucking Mets”. She’d actually smoke in her sleep. We’d even make faces right in her face to see if she’d wake up, but there was no way… she was OUT!

The weekend that my niece decided to stay over was during passover, when jews can’t have …. most bread products. My little niece thought that she was gonna be struck dead for eating Roy Roger’s Chicken. She begged Grandma not to make her have it, but Grandma basically forced it down her throat.

Or told her “it’s this or you eat your own farts…” whatever.

That was breakfast (at 1pm). On the way back from there Grandma had… and accident. In the elevator going back to her apartment. Without saying a word, Grandma simply pissed down her leg and left a puddle with my niece looking wide-eyed and in shock.

While Grandma was cleaning herself, my niece couldn’t take it anymore and called her mom, my sister, to pick her up. In Queens. From Staten Island. Demanded that they get her “NOW NOW NOW” (and rightfully show) or else she’d be going home alone. On the subway. In 1987. At 8 Years Old.

While my niece was waiting she decided to watch TV in Grandma’s bedroom, which was not a good idea, and led to her not being able to eat chicken cutlets for years due to Grandma getting changed right in front of her, and nakedly picking up the panties that she dropped.

My niece didn’t realize that every time we went to Grandma’s my dad was there. To sort of… run interference. And also my mom. Who would take us outta there when Grandma was too… weird…

When I was a kid my mom and my friend’s mom made us play outside. All the time.

This isn’t so odd because in the 1980’s we only had like 4 TV stations and no real internet. But we had Huffy bikes. And parks.

So my friend Andy and I would get our bikes and ride up to this park and play there all the time. Even though there were crackheads, and trench coat flashers and bad-touch vans we went about a half mile away from our homes, with no parental supervision.

So anyway ahem we’d hang out at the park and talk about how icky girls like Clairebeast were. And one day, we found out that the lake in the park was our local emergency reservoir (because a kid got drowned in there because he was swimming and they turned on the pumps for a maintainance check or something and he got sucked in …).

So after being lectured by our own parents, and then every one of our friend’s parents and the representative from the Water Board and our school’s principal the main thing that Andy and I got out of that is that we could pee in the lake. And then everyone would drink our pees.

And that. Would. Be. AWESOME

At this park there’s a bridge with two pump-houses. Where hobos sometimes stashed jugs of booze and drugs and crackheads sometimes died or whatever it is that they do… So, we’d get on the bridge, climb onto the stone railing and then pee. Every day. For an entire summer.

The other day, my girlfriend and I went to the park and I told her about this. Then I did some mental calculations, and realized how dumb we were. Because the whole thing is cleaned before it gets to your taps. And also the amount of pee 2 8 year old boys can produce is nothing compared to the sheer volume of water in that lake.

Also, if we peed in there, and then we drank it, we’d be drinking our own pee too. That part simply failed to register in our little 2nd grader minds. Because boys are retarted.

All of us.

Forever.

It was 1986. Ronald Regan was president. The Smurfs were all over the place. I was 6.

I was at Suzan’s (as in who you’re cruizin’ for a bruzin’ from… AKA my big sister) house while my mom and our dad (Suzan’s my paternal half sister and is like.. 30 years older than me) drank coffee on a Saturday morning. This was back in the golden days of Saturday Morning Cartoons, where you could wake up at 6am, get a bowl of sugar cerial, sit down in front of the TV and be babysat for 6 hours by Smurfs, Mon-Chi-Chis and every other sick cartoon that was awesome.

My niece (who is a year and a day older than me) and I were watching The Smurfs and drawing robots and dinosaurs and flowers and fairies etc in the living room. Hopped up on OJ and half a box of Cap’n Crunch, I went and hid behind the couch, took off my pants, folded them and took a blue magic marker to my wiener, jumped out in front of the TV and screamed “I’M A SMURF!!! LA LA LALALALA… LA LALA LA LAAAA (AKA the SMURF SONG)”

This freaked out my niece so much that she couldn’t scream. I then ran into the kitchen to show my parents and sister who didn’t have a sense of humor for that sort of crap. They all took turns beating my 6 year old ass.

The magic marker didn’t come off with regular soap and water, so my mom made me use AJAX. out in the driveway. So the whole world could see.