You’re here today because you’ve chosen to learn trumpet. You’ve made a wise choice. You’ve also made a foolish choice.

I know why you chose trumpet. It’s easy. It only has three buttons. Saxophone has, what, a hundred buttons? It also has a wooden reed that will break and leave splinters on your gums. Trumpet is all brass, all day long. Saxophone is a complicated and fickle girl; trumpet is a Spartan warrior. This is what you think, and you are wrong. Trumpet is a banshee. Trumpet is as difficult as life is long. What it lacks in buttons it makes up for stubbornness. When you play trumpet your fingers do little work but your face muscles called the embrasure are pulverized by the instrument’s demands. An untrained embrasure can implode after holding a high C for three bars of allegro four-four time. If you were born with a weak face, I suggest you leave now and check out the percussion room. There is a bell kit with your name on it. It’s a matter of genetics, really. If you have Anglo-Saxon blood, stick around. Your embrasure was made to endure trumpet. Same goes for blacks. As for Turks, Poles and island people, listen carefully. I can’t tell you not to learn trumpet. This is Texas, U.S.A. We are a free state. If I were to say that you will fail at trumpet because your embrasure is inferior, I could be fired. If I were to say that when you hold a high C for more than three bars of allegro four-four time your embrasure will burst and for the rest of your life you’ll have to communicate with a touch-pad that says what you type, your parents could sue me. So I’ll just say that trumpet loves children of all races no matter how ill-equipped they are to play trumpet.

Walk over to the trumpet rack. Choose a trumpet, a trumpet case and a bottle of trumpet oil. From this day on, trumpet will forever be a part of your life, no matter how soon you quit. And you will quit. Everyone quits trumpet. After you quit you will love your trumpet-free life. You will have more time for grab-ass and firecrackers and all that. But years later, trumpet will haunt you. When you are fired from your job you will want to blow away the pain into a warm mouthpiece. When your wife says “You don’t understand me” you will think about the only thing you’ve ever understood: trumpet.

One day you will go into your parent’s basement and dust off trumpet and try to play it. But you won’t be able to. Your embrasure will be too weak; trumpet will be too gunky. Its buttons won’t work and you won’t be able to find the trumpet oil because you never took care of your trumpet accessories. You will hold your gunky trumpet up to your mouth and look at yourself in the mirror and you will feel rotten about quitting trumpet as well as all the other things you’ve learned and quit. You will feel older than you actually are.

Trumpet won’t feel anything.

The best part about going over to Gary’s is the internet. He has wireless internet so I can use his laptop and cuddle him on the couch while he watches ESPN. I’m not much a technology nut but I like this wireless thing because it lets us each do what we want to but still be together at the same time. I don’t like watching ESPN, and he doesn’t like to do what I do online: look at dumb clothes that dumb rich people wear. I never had internet at my house so I didn’t know about all dumb clothes people wear. I’m talking about stuff they wear in New York City and California and probably Boston too. I’ve seen dumb clothes on TV before, but they don’t show you the prices on TV. You have to go online for that.

On the Bloomingdale’s website there’s a Diane von Furstenberg dress called the Beulah that sells for $795. I don’t even want to know what Beulah means but if I had to guess I’d say it means spoiled cunt in Italian because only a spoiled cunt would wear that dress. The website says its airy chiffon cascades to the floor in dramatic drapes, while sparkly gold sequin pailettes adorn the bodice. Adorn the bodice: that’s funny to me for some reason.

-Hey Gary, this website says that this fancy dress adorns the bodice. A-dorn. The. Bod-ice. Is that funny to you too, or just me?

-Everything is funny to you when you’re drunk.

-Hey Gary, you want to buy me the Dolce and Gabbana Ocelot-Print Chiffon Party Dress? It’s only $1,295.

-Sure. And I’ll eat canned tuna for a year.

Anyone who wears that ocelot dress is asking for it. The model who’s modeling the ocelot dress on the website is asking for it too. She doesn’t even look like a real person. Her arms are shiny and her elbows are sharp, like they’ve been whittled by a grandpa on a porch somewhere. Her face doesn’t look like a real human face but rather like the mold of porcelain doll’s face that was modeled off of the prettiest girl in the world. Since when was it hot to look like a mannequin? That’s why young girls are so sad all the time. Because they look like real people but the girls they see on the internet don’t so they think that something must be wrong with them when in fact it’s the girls on the internet who have all the problems. These Bloomingdale’s models have been sexually abused, I’m sure.

When I was a teenager I would get sad because I thought I didn’t look right. There were twenty-four super-pretty girls in my class. Twenty-three after Heather Bee moved to Lansing. Sheryl Crosby was one of them. I always thought she was their leader because she was always talking and the other girls were always listening to her. In science class Sheryl would talk about which boys bought her lunch and whose dick she’d touched. I always thought that was tacky. Sheryl looked like Britney Spears and for Halloween freshman year she had the gall to dress up like a Catholic school girl so she looked Britney Spears in the hit me baby one more time music video. I was a bug that year.

I always thought I looked weird and I felt bad about it until I read an article about how unhappy Britney Spears is most of the time. That made me feel better. I like to think that all the good-looking people on the planet are the saddest and all the regular-looking people are the happiest. And it doesn’t matter anyway because I have Gary now. Who does Sheryl Crosby have? Nobody. I heard her boyfriend left her because he was sick of how dudes would always hit on her at bars and how dudes would come into the library and pretend to browse the movies near the front desk but really they were just looking at Sheryl. Sheryl is beautiful but show me the most beautiful girl in the world and I’ll show you a guy who’s tired of fucking her. He should have listened to that song Grandma always put on in the car, the one that goes: If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife. I wish more dudes would take that advice to heart and give us regulars a chance.

The Tourino Mouflon boots by Dolce and Gabbana drive me bonkers. They are, and I quote, military inspired booties. But they’re just tall boots with high heels. Just ‘cause they’re boots how does that make them military inspired? The people writing these websites will write anything they think sounds good no matter how wrong it is. And who wants to wear boots with high heels anyway? Is it so you’ll look taller when you’re out camping? Or so you’ll look rugged when you’re drinking purple cocktails on top of the Empire State Building with your gal pals? So you can be all like, I hope Fabian comes this rooftop party so he can see my military inspired booties. Because I want him to think that I’m rugged and elegant. He doesn’t want a girl who’s too fancy or one who’s a dyke. That’s why I wear these booties. So he thinks I’m riiight in the middle. Fabian bought me the ocelot dress I wanted so badly so I let him put his thumb in my butthole.

The Tourino Mouflon boots cost $995. If I had $2290 I’d buy the Tourino Mouflon boots and the ocelot dress and I’d go as a coastal cunt for Halloween. That is, if I still dressed up for Halloween. Then I’d return them because earlier I said I’d murder anyone who wore that stuff and I’m a woman of my word. If I kept wearing them I’d have to murder myself and Terrence would have to live at Gary’s  all by himself and he would not like that at all.

-Hey Gary, if I died tomorrow, would you take care of Terrence for me?

-I guess so.

-I like you, Gary Welles.

-I like you too, Linda Lauper.

[a kiss.]

[100th post!]

NEXT: The Hangbot Sheriff

Why is dancing the thing they always want to do? Do they actually enjoy it or do they just want people to look at them and their man? Are they thinking, “Look at us, we like to do it with our clothes in front of other people”? Do they secretly want to do it in public? Would M. do it in a karaoke bar again or was one time enough for a lifetime?

Why hasn’t the wife asked me to go dancing lately? Has she given up on me? Or is she going dancing with other dudes behind my back? How many times have we gone dancing, ever? Three? And wasn’t only one time fun? Was it at that Spanish restaurant? Argentinean? And wasn’t there a dark room in the back where people were tangoing? Or was it waltzing? And didn’t the women have to wear spikes to go on the dance floor, but the wife didn’t have spikes? And she approached an older lady who was sitting down and smoking and said, “I’m sorry, but I really want to dance and I don’t have the right shoes. What size are you?” And didn’t the women look me up and down approvingly and say, “How about this: I dance with him first and then you borrow my shoes?” And didn’t I say that I don’t know how to tango and didn’t the old lady say, “Do know how to make love? If so, you can tango”? And didn’t the wife say, “ He does sometimes”? And didn’t the old lady want to dance for two songs because, she said, “One song is never enough, is it?” Didn’t she grab my arm like she was trying to hurt me? Like my arm had done something terrible to her? Was she doing that because that’s how she always dances or do some older people live harder because they didn’t live very hard when they were younger? Was she sick or something and had “tango with a young man” on her bucket list? And didn’t she kiss my neck after the second song and wasn’t it kind of awesome? When she took off her shoes and gave them to the wife, weren’t they too big, or too small? And when the wife tried to dance wasn’t she pathetic? Knees buckling, face contorting, all the things tangoers shouldn’t do? But didn’t she say, “We’re going to tango, dammit”? But did we? Is it called tangoing if it’s barely tangoing? A legitimate tangoer wouldn’t call it tangoing, would he? We did whatever we were doing for three songs and then didn’t the wife say something sweet like, “I don’t care if we’re bad at this as long as you’re with me” and didn’t I say something sweet like, “I’d dance a shitty tango with you every night if I could”?

Do you take the mistress dancing? Do you take the employee you’re throwing it to dancing? Does she want to dance for the sake of dancing or does she want to dance to make herself feel better about the whole thing? So she can say to her friends: “Yeah my boss is throwing to me but at least he took me dancing”? Does M. have friends? Is her boss who’s also throwing it to her her only friend?

Will I still throw it to her after Hey Jealousy goes under?

Has the wife called her folks yet? Should I even ask?

-What did they say? Wait. Don’t tell me. I’m in a good mood for once.

-OK. I won’t tell you then.

-So they did say something?

-Yes.

-Good news or bad news?

-It’s definitely news.

-Tell me.

-The answer is: Yes. They’ll help out.

-Oh my god are you serious?

-Yes. They said yes, I can’t believe it. Maybe this will give them something to talk about. After being married for fifty years you only talk about friends who’ve died and what kind of fruit they have at the grocery. Oh. But there are conditions.

-Conditions?

-Big conditions. You might not like them.

-They want to change the menu?

-You should change the menu anyway, but that’s not it. It’s my nephew, Zachary. They want him to be assistant manager. It’s kind of ridiculous, but they said they wouldn’t help unless you took him under your wing.

-Have I met him?

-Maybe once, at Don’s birthday two years ago. He’s 25. He goes by Z., which everyone in the family hates. He graduated a while ago and now he’s just floating and Don and Rachel don’t really care and give him money but mom and dad want him to grow up.

-So they’re buying him a job? Because that’s growing up – being told you’re an assistant manager at a dying restaurant? Does he even want to do it?

-Yeah he does. He already has a job, kinda. He makes shirts. But it’s just costing Don money.

-Oh, right right right. Your nephew who makes the shitty shirts. I think he got my email address at Don’s thing and sent me his site. I bought one that said Sorry Is A Word For The Unmindful.

- Sorry is a word for the unmindful?

-Dumb, right? It’s like, you shouldn’t say you’re sorry about stuff because you should be mindful of the fact and self-aware that your words… I don’t even know, it doesn’t matter. But man, that kid is the worst.

-He means well. He had a weird childhood. Effing Don wrote that My Dad Rocks book and it fucked him up. Have you read that?

-Parts, while shitting.

-It’s pretty bad, but he made a fortune off it. Here, I’m gonna go find it. If he’s gonna be your employee maybe you should read the book.

-That makes no sense whatsoever.

-I was kidding.

-I never know with you, and we’ve been married how long?

[The wife is in the bathroom now and can’t hear him. She comes back into the living room carrying a copy of My Dad Rocks.]

-Here you go. Homework.

-I can’t read this, it’s disgusting. It’s got that urine-y film on it from being in the shitter all these years.

-No it doesn’t.

-Yes, feel it. When a book stays in the bathroom for a while it’s gets a film on it. All the piss and shit particles that are released in the air settle on the paper. Here, rub its cover and then smell your hand.

-Fine. [and she does just that.] I don’t smell anything.

-Taste your hand then.

-No.

-Just do it.

-Even if the book hadn’t been in the bathroom I wouldn’t touch it and then taste my hand. It’s gross.

-You’re gross.

-You’re gross.

-No you are.

-I wanna make you gross right now.

[And they get gross in the living room.]

NEXT: The Fox In The Garage Part 9: The Ocelot Dress

Stick it in the pie and pinch the minnow.

Say it with me. Stick it in the pie and pinch the minnow.

And again. Stick it in the pie and pinch the minnow.

Sex is complicated. It helps if you know what you’re doing. You can read all the books and web pages you want, but you only need one trick: Stick it the pie and pinch the minnow.

Some folks say you should cradle the minnow and pinch the poncho. Others say you should flick the poncho and cradle the tiny fins. And others say it’s bad luck to even acknowledge the tiny fins and that you should pay attention to the pie and the pie alone. They’re all over-thinking it. You only need to do one thing: Stick it in the pie and pinch the minnow.

I wish someone would have told me that years ago. I used to cradle the poncho and flick the honey cup. What a chump I was. Sometimes I’d gnaw at the gummybin. I didn’t know any better. During what was my worst performance I knuckled the tiny fins until they were mottled and turned inward.

I’ve even palmed the ugly dog. But that was a long time ago.

I carried on like this for years. I’d pinch the pie and avoid the minnow. I’d slap the gummybin while diddling the honey cup. What a chump. Then Uncle Derrick had a stroke.

I went to visit him in the hospital and knelt down beside his bed. I asked him if he was alright. “I am not alright,” he said. “I’ve had a stroke. I will likely die soon, maybe later today. It’s not for me to know.” I said that I was sorry. He slapped me on the forehead and said that I should never apologize for no reason. “You didn’t give me the stroke. A woman did.”

I asked how a woman gave him a stroke and he said, “I had stuck it in her pie and I was pinching the minnow. I was doing it so well and for so long that her gummybin exploded and got all over my widow’s patch. This surprised me so much that I had a stroke. My whole life I’ve been sticking it in the pie and pinching the minnow and never before has a woman’s gummybin exploded. I’ve stuck it in countless and pies and I’ve pinched countless minnows. Each pie and each minnow has had its pluses and minuses, but hers were the best. I flew too high and too fast and now I’m paying for it. With my life.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Of course not.”

The next day I met a lady while crossing the street and brought her back to my motel room. I stuck it in the pie. I pinched the minnow. She didn’t explode, but she did start praying afterward. I looked up to heaven and thanked Uncle Derrick, whose brain muscle had bled out that morning.

Yellow Springs: artsy town, good for hiking, good for looking at goofy folks. Get a slice of whole wheat pizza at Ha Ha Pizza and then go for a hike in John Bryon State Park and find a spring. The village is called Yellow Springs because the water in the springs is so full of iron that it turns rocks yellow. Cup your hand and dip it into the water and drink. The water tastes like blood. If one of your friends brought pot then now would be a good time to smoke it. Walk away from the other hikers and find a secluded spot. This shouldn’t be hard to do because chances are, the other hikers are trying to walk away from you and find their own secluded spot to smoke pot. After you smoke drive back into town and browse the record shops, but be careful. One time our friend Mike chatted up the dude who worked at the record shop and the dude convinced Mike to buy four CDs, two by a local band called Romance of Young Tigers and two by a German jazz piano player whose name I can’t remember. Each one cost fifteen dollars. On the drive home we played a Romance of Young Tigers CD and Mike said he was in love with it but we knew he was just saying that because he’d spent his money on it. We also played the German guy’s CDs, which were recorded live and the sound wasn’t good. Mike said it was cool that the sound wasn’t good because it was raw but, again, we knew he was just saying that because he was the one who spent the money.

Yellow Springs: good for hiking and good for pizza, but don’t let those dudes in the record shops tell you which CDs to buy.

Yellow Springs is home to Antioch College, which was a bastion of progressive politics and free thinking until it closed in 2008 due to lack of money.

[Luke and Dr. Philbin are cleaning the bobber on the driveway.]

Dr. Philbin: You guys still make that Granny’s Country omelet?

Luke: Yep.

-That’s what I usually get. What’s on that?

-There’s ham, onions, cheese.

-Oh yeah.

-And green peppers, I think. Yeah it’s pretty good.

-Just pretty good? No. That’s a great omelet. Probably the best thing on your menu.

-I like it OK.

-That’s my usual. I don’t go there enough to walk in and say, Gimme the usual, but if I did, they’d bring me a Granny’s Country and black coffee and a side of bacon. Does anyone ever say gimme the usual to you?

-Not really. Well, there’s this one lady who always orders two eggs scrambled and wheat toast, and sometimes she’ll say, I’ll have the usual.

-That’s nice. It’s nice to have some regularity. Things change so much. With people always moving or changing their diets willy nilly.

-Right.

-I’m not saying people should stay in the same place their whole life. Because they shouldn’t. Get out and explore the world, I’ve always said that. But stick to your guns. Stick to your order. Don’t go nuts and switch to egg whites because some rich lady in a movie you like orders egg whites.

-I guess you’re right.

-When I was a kid my mother had a raw fish phase. And this was way before everyone started eating sushi every Godamned day. She’d bring home a hunk of tuna and cut it up and say, Dinner is served, get it while it’s hot. And my pops, well. He was beside himself about it. He started buying frozen dinners and he’d eat two of those every night we ate raw fish. We didn’t call it sushi back then. We didn’t know what real sushi was back then. I’ve read that a little sushi is OK once and a while but too much will make you sick.

-Like Jeremy Piven. He ate too much and got sick.

-I don’t know who that is but I’ll take your word for it.

-He’s an act—

-After Dad ate his frozen dinners he’d go to the basement and look at his maps. He had no less than twenty maps. All of them were really old, and he said they were worth good money, but after he died I took ‘em all in to a place to get ‘em appraised and you know what the guy told me?

-What?

-That they were worth diddly squat. How do you like that? This whole time he was leaving the dinner table to admire his wonderful maps. Or study them. God knows what he was doing with them. And they were worthless this whole time. I guess he just didn’t want to sit at the table with us while we ate our sushi. That was how his generation behaved. And God love ‘em.

-We all have to have our thing.

-I hear that. When I got older, this bobber was my thing. And soon it’ll be your thing. Once it’s ready to ride.

-I’m looking forward to it being my thing.

-Have you thought about your first ride?

-What do you mean?

-Where you’re gonna go, what you’re gonna do the first time you ride it.

-Not really. I’ll see where Sarah wants to go.

-Sarah? No, man. The first ride is about you. What does Luke want to do?

-I’m not sure, but I’ll think about it.

-It’s important for you to think hard about it. It might not seem like a big deal now, but later on, when you’re thinking about all the stuff you did in your life, you’ll remember it. It was a big deal for me so I planned it. It’s good to plan for stuff like this so you don’t blow it.

-I’ll try not to blow it.

-I sure as hell didn’t blow my first ride. My first ride was… it was something out of a movie.

-Where did you go?

-I can’t tell you.

-OK. So we might be running out of bug and tar. If I have time after work tomorrow I’ll swing by AutoZone.

-Sounds good. So my first ride. It’s a big secret.

-Alright.

-I guess I could tell you. But you would have to swear to me that you’d never tell anyone and if you did tell someone you’d make it up to me by doing me a huge solid.

-I don’t need to know about it.

-I know you don’t, but I’m going to tell you about it anyway.

-You don’t have to.

-I know, but I need to. So it gets passed down. See, I don’t have a real son. I have Sarah, and she’s great, but she’s not someone I can tell this stuff to, if you know what I mean. And I have Ross. But Ross and I have been, well, you probably heard.

-I have heard.

-He is my son, but he’s not really my kind of person, the kind of person I’d have chats with, if you know what I mean. Now, you, however. You’re my future son-in-law. That’s just as good as flesh and blood. That’s why you’re gonna know about this ride. And you can tell it to your sons.

-Are you OK?

-I’m fine. I tend to get emotional when I talk about it. I’ve only ever told my father and my priest before and I got emotional both times. Alright. I’m gonna have to ask you not to talk for a while. Here’s the story of my first ride. It was October, 1983. I was thirty years old. I had recently opened my own practice in Kettering. Tania had given birth to Sarah to August. I had just bought the bobber practically new. It was a present to myself for becoming a dad, something I’d always wanted to be one day. And now I was a dad, and a motorcycle guy. Things were looking up. I rode the bike home from the shop, but that doesn’t count as the first ride. So I get home and — I should backtrack and mention that Tania wasn’t ready to make love yet after having Sarah.

-OK.

-I said don’t say anything.  She had just had the baby and we were in adjustment mode. I was a little anxious to get things back to where they were. In the bedroom. You’ll understand what I mean in a few years. So I bring home the bobber and park it in the driveway and walk in the house. I have a perfect memory of what happened next: Tania was making Cornish game hens in the kitchen. We didn’t know it at the time but Cornish game hens would soon become a family favorite. Sarah was like a lump at her feet. I walk in the kitchen and say, Honey, I’m home, and I have a new toy. Now, Tania didn’t know about the bobber. It was a complete surprise for her. So she’s like, Toy? What do you mean? I take her hand and walk her outside into the driveway and she practically falls over, she was so shocked. She says, Oh my gosh, I’m so happy for you, and she kisses me real hard. Harder than I’d ever been kissed by anyone ever. And I’ve kissed some ferocious women. I once kissed a woman who was on death row. So she’s kissing me and grabbing me and pulling me back inside the house, and the whole time I’m like, what’s going on here? Do you want to? Right now? And she’s like, Yes, yes I do, I’m ready, I’m ready. And so I lay her down real softly on the kitchen floor and gave her a go around that could have won an award if someone had been filming it. It was intense. But. And here’s where it gets really personal. It wasn’t the same. You know what I mean? After the baby. She wasn’t as good. Things were different, I could tell. She knew it too. But I didn’t say anything about it because it would’ve crushed her. So I’m giving it to her whole hog on the kitchen floor, but I can’t reach climax. I just can’t. That has never been a problem before because I’m the kind of guy who always climaxes. Never too soon, though. Always right at the perfect moment. Except for this time. So after a while we just stop and she gets dressed and gets back to the Cornish game hens. I say it’s time for me to go on my first ride and she kisses me on the cheek or whatever and I head out to the bike. Now. Maybe this hasn’t happened to you, but when you get that far with a girl but don’t climax, it can hurt. Blue balls, we used to call it. I had blue balls in the worst way. My first thought was: take care of it solo in the bathroom. But then I was like: come on, Philbin. You just bought the bike of your dreams and you’re gonna whack off on the toilet like you’re celebrating your Confirmation? This occasion needed something better, and I know what it is. So I hop on the bike and ride. I ride up to 75, and then to 70 going east. And I’m riding with purpose, with a grin on my face, because I knew exactly where I was going. If you know where you’re going in life then you can go as fast as you want and wear the biggest grin you want because even if you don’t get there, you will have traveled with purpose and that’s what’s important. I was riding to Columbus, and I was making great time. Back when I was in dental school at OSU there was this guy we used to call Popeye. I don’t know why we called him Popeye. He wasn’t strong or anything, and he hated the nickname, but the more he’d complain about it, the more we called him Popeye. The point is, Popeye liked to make love to hookers. He wasn’t an ugly guy, but he was shy and he could never get a date, so he’d go to dances stag and get real drunk and then afterward, when we were trying to make love to our dates, he’d go to a whorehouse on Chesnut Street and make love to a hooker. In the end he spent less money than us and he had better lovemaking sessions than us because those hookers were pros, he said. I never went with him because I was too much of a weakling at the time. Cut to 1986. I’m not a weakling anymore. Now I’m a man going 95 miles per hour on a 1978 XS750, a man who just got blueballed by his own wife. So I ride to Chesnut Street. All the houses there look like whorehouses. They’re all missing shutters and they all have empty beer cans on the stoop. But one especially run-down house has, give or take, ten cars parked out front. I see a shirtless dude stumble out with his arm around a large black woman in a one-piece bathing suit and I’m thinking: this must be Popeye’s whorehouse.  So I park the bobber and walk in. There’s an older lady in the family room. She asks me what I’m doing there and I say I’m looking for date. She says, Just so you know, this is a sorority house. And I wink at her like yeah right. She tells me to wash up in the bathroom and then wait in one of the bedrooms and leave the door open so the girl knows which one you’re in. So I do that. A minute later this tall blonde woman walks in. She says, Why are you not undressed yet? I’m not going to do that for you. I will always remember that: I’m not going to do that for you. She must have been Swedish or Danish or some sort of Scandinavian because she was at least six three and her hair was perfectly straight lines. And she was strong. Once we got down to the doing the stuff she was pinning me down and clawing at my chest and stretching out my scrotum. She pulled my scrotum up and out so much that it covered my gut. I didn’t think it could get it so thinned out and so wide, but she showed me that it could. I thought she was gonna rip it in half. Image that: I get home and have to explain that to Tania that on my first ride I accidentally fell off the bobber and tore my scrotum in half. But the hooker didn’t tear it, thank God. She took her time and taught me a lot about myself and what a man and a woman could do together. Things got disgusting, and when we ran out of time I was begging for an extra ten minutes but she said she had to go to her babysitting job. I don’t think I need to go into more detail, but I will say this: she cured my blue balls. On the ride back to Dayton I was only doing sixty, maybe even fifty. I was in no hurry. And that was my first ride.

-I don’t think my first ride will be that eventful.

-It probably won’t. But if it is, so be it.

-It won’t be.

-Probably not. But if it is, you can tell me about it. I won’t tell Sarah.

-I’ll probably just ride to Yellow Springs and get pizza and maybe go for a walk in the woods.

-That would be a good first ride for you.

NEXT: Do We Need Cynar? 7

Little Ann’s poops have become a problem. It’s because Ann weaned him off Lunchables. She says all the artificial gunk they put in there was killing him. Now she’s feeding him apple sauce and bananas and tuna, and it’s giving him wretched poops. They’re big black clots. Neither runny nor solid; right in the middle in terms of consistency, like Nickelodeon Gak, only black. When I change him — and it seems like I’m ALWAYS the one who’s changing him – it gets under my fingernails and on my wrist. It gets on Little Ann’s hands and he spreads it around the apartment. I’ve found black on the coffee table and on the oven handle. Our Netflix movies are often returned with black on the corners. One time, an hour after I’d changed him, I was brushing my teeth and when I looked in the mirror I spotted a smear of black on my chin.

Before Ann changed his diet, his poops were compact turds the size of gherkins. These were beautiful turds. I miss them so much. The poops were so adorable that I took pictures of his dirty diaper once and posted them.  Friends I hadn’t spoken to in years praised them in the comments:

-show off!

-gorgeous poo!

-you must be so proud.

-i wish dexter would shit like that.

-That a boy. I’m coming to nyc in october. we should hang.

After biting into an apple with a black spot on it I was like, fuck it, and started keeping a stash of Lunchables under the bed. When Ann’s not around Little Ann will eat Lunchables. His stool will be hardened. It might break up his parents, but it will be hardened. And while I realize I’m putting my sanity before his health, the kid was tied up in a closet for ten years, so the way I see it, anything’s an improvement. And he loves Lunchables. When I unwrap one he says Lunchable! and takes over unwrapping duties and then eats the stack of ham in one bite. Next up: the cheese. He eats the cheese one slice at a time, sometimes on a cracker and sometimes not. Then he eats the rest of the crackers. Crumbs will go everywhere and he’ll say crumbs as if he were saying aw shucks. It’s pretty awesome. He’ll let me have a cracker or two if he’s feeling charitable.

It’s good for fathers and sons to have a thing to do together, and if our thing is eating contraband food, then so be it.

I changed him this morning and the poops were still black, and still clot-y, but less runny. Less like Gak and more like a gooey baked yam. (Yes, I am squishing his shit between my fingers to test it.) So, the Lunchables are working. His poops will never return to the praiseworthy turds of the past, but that’s OK. Being a parent means seeing your small victories as big victories, and if I can harden Little Ann’s poops only a little, then I will have won.

NEXT: She Took Her Time And Taught Me A Lot About Myself