On a hot summer Saturday in 1983, my mother and I were browsing the record racks at one of our favorite air conditioned department stores. Having already purchased Thriller, it was silently understood that our journey to the music section was to be reserved for browsing purposes only. My mother was casually flipping through the pop section, and upon retrieving an album, held it up and out in front of her. Daryl Hall and John Oates glowed in pastels and neons on the cover.

"Wow," she said. "I always thought they were called Haulin’ Oats. You know, like they were carrying oats around in a wheelbarrow or something."

She looked down at me and I smiled and I couldn’t help but let that smile turn into a really loud and brilliant laugh.

Some Things I Can’t Remember to Forget
(They Have No Bearing)

Number one- Early signs pointing towards my delusional behavior.

For foggy reasons that I am still confused and reeling about, I was raised Catholic until my parents divorced when I was 13. To my nearest recollection, it had something to do with my father mentioning in passing over a meatloaf dinner one evening that he was Catholic. The next thing I knew, my preadolescent Sundays became a whirlwind of sweater vests, scratchy wool pants, and men with beards and white robes waving around fuming, stench-filled lamps. My father, unknowingly having convinced me that he planned it this way, never actually attended church with us because he worked early Sunday mornings. So, he got to avoid the pain of the service but managed to roll in just as we were coming home with the donuts. I made plans for this to become my adult religion as well.

So, as a Catholic and as a ten year old boy, one is expected to participate in a rite of passage of sorts, a ritual known as first communion. Little did I know that preparing to properly accept waxy bread wafers and cheap tasting table wine would be such an ordeal. Before I knew it, I was going to night school and had a whole new set of workbooks and classmates and was drawing, as accurately as I knew how, pictures of things like Jonah inside a whale’s stomach. My mother also insisted that I dress a little nicer for this too, so it was pretty much church and school and me missing "Silver Spoons" all rolled into one. I was less than impressed. The one thing that made the experience bearable for me was, of course, a girl.

Amber was probably a year or two older than me, with hair that was short in the back but grew as it moved forward, rising up into a big Ocean Spray wave in the front that crested down in front of her left eye. She continually sported nothing but neon from head to toe: Neon sweatshirts with cut off sleeves and necks that somehow hung off her shoulders, neon leg warmers over her stretch pants, and the occasional coordinating headband. She would walk into class with her Esprit bag hung over her shoulder, never looking at anybody, slide into a seat, stare straight ahead, and never speak unless spoken to. Needless to say, I was completely infatuated and terrified by her.

One night, as usual, our discussion turned to the subject of church, specifically sitting in church and our thoughts on it, and our instructor, who was a predictably drab woman in her mid-forties, posed the question: "What do you think when you see someone sitting in church and they’re shuffling their feet, moving around a lot, being all fidgety, staring at the ceiling, things like that?"

Everyone sat quiet, but I immediately had it. I knew exactly what to say, and I knew that when I said it, Amber would laugh. Amber would laugh so deeply that she might have to excuse herself, and there was also no doubt that she would politely ask if she could sit by me for the remaining four weeks of the class. My idea was edgy, but I was forcing myself to contemplate it.

Here’s what I wanted to say: "Maybe they have to pee."

God, it was fucking brilliant. Not only would she think the observation was hilarious, she would also have no choice but to admit I was kind of a cool badass for saying "pee" in the house of God. These thoughts were racing, speeding across my eyes and around my head. As they were, other kids around me were starting to pipe up.

"They’re bored."
"They don’t want to be there very much."

No, no, no. Nice try, I thought. But the teacher was giving them praise, telling them yes, exactly, good. I was frozen, staring at Amber who was staring ahead, gazing straight at absolutely nothing, surely waiting for the class to be over. I had no choice. I shot my hand into the air just as the teacher began to speak again.

"Should church be a boring thing? Yes?" She pointed at me.
I was rubbing my clammy hands together. "I guess not," I blurted.

The teacher nodded, moved on, and I sat there in my slacks and my button up shirt, sweat starting to form around the edges of my blonde mop of hair, and I decided to join Amber in staring straight ahead and waiting for it all to be over.

Number two- Steve Miller is a perfect deal breaker.

I have ceased relationships for less than this, but it surely is the final test. I always look for it, whenever I’m in their car or at their apartment/house. If I’m spending time with a girl and I find out that she owns, or has owned in the last five years, a copy of Steve Miller’s Greatest Hits, I walk. That’s it. Now believe me, I know that when I say this I am alienating at least 50% of the girls my age, but I have to maintain some sort of standards. To me, it’s the same as meeting your current girlfriend’s jackass ex-boyfriend at a party and thinking to yourself: "My God, she actually fucked that guy?" It’s like that but somehow a little worse.

I was dating a girl when I was about 19 and things were getting to the point where we were pretty much boyfriend and girlfriend, and I had yet to find the CD. Now, we were 19, and she had just graduated high school, which is where Steve Miller sucks in most of his female fans. So I had to ask, thinking that maybe she had recently sold it or something, which is possibly respectable, depending on how long ago it was. So I came out with it. I asked her flat out where it was, demanded that she show it to me. Things had been going way too well up until that point, and I knew there had to be something lurking, maybe in her old bedroom at her parent’s house, that would blow it.

"I don’t listen to Steve Miller," she said.
"Not ever?" I replied.
"Nope, never really liked him."
"Not even in high school?"
"Nope. Why?"
"No reason."

Then we went out, had some pasta, and I decided I’d wait a little while longer to ask about Janis Joplin.

Number three: A short case study in the fine art of being a dick for no reason.

My mother, brother and I decided to go camping one summer with my aunt and my two cousins. I was probably 11 years old, and never really cared for camping. I had only been once before, and found myself severely missing the things I took for granted at home, like my bed. Because of the lack of modern devices of any kind, there was obviously no running water at our campsite, so our primary source of water was a big 2.5 gallon dispenser propped up on a stump.

We woke up one morning and my brother and I and our two cousins walked over to the stump to brush our teeth. My cousins each put toothpaste on their brushes and stuck them into their mouths. My brother looked at me as I prepared to do the same.

"Aren’t you going to put water on it first?" he asked me.
"What are you talking about?"
"You always put water on the brush before you use it at home, so do I."

This, of course, was completely true. I always did it this way, but for whatever reason decided to follow the lead of my cousins and break the rules.

"This is how I always do it," I said.
"No it’s not." He was getting quickly frustrated, and for good reason.

"I don’t know where you’re coming from, but you should get off it." I really liked to say "get off it" back then. I worked it in whenever I could. Sometimes I would also use the variation "come off it." The tears were starting to well up in my brother’s eyes. I was pleased with myself, grinning a shitty grin. He had caught on to the fact that I was just trying to get to him, and he also had to admit that I was doing a very fine job of it.

"I’m going to tell mom," he said.
"Sweet, tell her. She’ll tell you the truth, that I brush my teeth like a normal human being and that you’re the freak."

He ran away, fully crying, determined to settle this by playing the mom card. I watched him talking to her and it was clear that she couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. "Be nicer to your brother," she said across the campsite.
"Tell him to stop lying," I responded.

My brother ran back to the water dispenser and as I was washing my brush under the dispenser he knocked it onto the dirty pine needled ground and I stared down at it, knowing that I absolutely deserved it.

Number four- It’s never too young to start warping a sense of manhood.

It was rare that my father and I would take trips alone together, but on occasion in my childhood I would find myself on the back of his motorcycle, topped with a heavy helmet that would wrench back and forth on my small neck as we turned corners or changed lanes. I would ride semi-terrified, my arms wrapped tightly around his waist on some back country roads, confused by why we always took the scenic route to get to somewhere that was a half mile off the interstate.

It was on an afternoon in September of my 13th year that I found myself on one such excursion with my father. We were on our way to a country club of some sort to go to one of his long time friend’s baby showers. It was kind of a nontraditional affair, apparently, because men were invited, the baby had already been born, and my father chose to wear a red tank top with some sort of Malibu scene on the back of it. I stared at these tropical palm trees all the way to the event, getting a break only once as we stopped to get something to drink and so I could pick up the newest N.W.A. tape. Trips with my father were always great opportunities to pick up music that my mother would never allow me to have. He never bothered to check the content of albums that contained classic songs like "Just Don’t Bite It" and "To Kill A Hooker." He may have very well just laughed anyway.

We arrived at the club to find that it was indeed a fairly casual affair, and we were not out of place in our shorts and T-shirts. In fact, most of the people in attendance were in sandals and loosely buttoned up shirts. The women, some of them carrying babies, wore sun hats outside on the decks that lined the room where we stood amongst the tables of food. We made our rounds, walking in and out of circles of people, saying hellos to those who I faintly remembered and a handful of people who I had seen earlier in the summer.

We finally made our way to my father’s friend, who, in what seemed like a spare moment, was hovering over one of the catered tables putting carrot sticks into his mouth. I remembered him always having a mustache, but he had lost it since I had last seen him and he looked, by all outward appearances, a lot cleaner. He was tanned, but not too deeply, and his hair was slicked up and back flawlessly. He appeared to be in good shape and was wearing khaki slacks with a white shirt buttoned down to show a little of the chest area. He turned when he saw us approaching and smiled to reveal adult braces, the kind that are supposed to match the color of one’s teeth and therefore be less noticeable. He somehow managed to pull it off fairly well.

"Holy shit," he said. "I was hoping you would come. And look at this guy!"

I smiled and looked at my dad, not remembering when or why I had agreed to attend this event. I felt my new cassette burning in my pocket and I wanted to go home and listen to it as soon as possible. Who knew what wonderful new adventures the boys from Compton had experienced in the last couple years?

"You remember Don, right?" said my father.
"Yeah sure, hi," I said. Don was smiling at me, taking it all in. He stared for a while, said nothing to me, and turned to my father.

"You gotta see this kid of mine," he said. "I mean, I’m telling you, he’s a specimen." He pushed his head in close to us. "I’m a lucky fucking guy," he whispered. He pulled his head back and started looking around. "Where’s my wife?" he asked to no one in particular.

"Hi honey." A tall, gorgeous brunette woman appeared from nowhere, holding a small child in her arms. Her sun dress was low cut and the baby was pushed up under and against her swollen breasts, which were bursting out over her neckline. She caught me staring and I turned pathetically back to my father. "Hello," she said. I got immediately warm and managed a lame grin.

Don turned to his wife and his baby and then back to us. "Would you take a look at this little son of a bitch? I mean, can you believe it? I’m out of my head right now." My father and I nodded and smiled.

"Good lookin’ little guy," said my father. "Looks like he might be a football player."

"You got that straight," said Don. He pushed his head in close to us again. "And he’s hung like a fucking donkey! I kid you not, this kid’s dick is huge, almost as big as mine." His smile grew to enormous proportions as he swiveled his head back and forth, looking at my father and then myself.

I looked down at the pink little child, his tiny fingers trying to grasp onto his mother’s tits, and he barely had his eyes open as spittle ran down his cheek. His mother didn’t even look up, just smiled down at him.
My father laughed. "You don’t say, Don."

"Oh shit, the kid’s got a cock like Secretariat, it’s bordering on obscene. He’ll be a lady’s man, there’s no doubt about that."

I smiled and laughed and then excused myself and walked over to the catered tables and started stuffing my face with carrots and celery and watched my father laughing as Don made gestures with his hands. I saw Don’s wife break from the two of them and make her way towards the deck and I followed her, knowing that I had a while to wait before we would hop back on the cycle for the long ride home.

Number five- You know that it somehow hurts worse than it looks.

My brother had a friend, Trevor, who lived across the street from us when we were growing up. Trevor was a fairly frail kid, neither really big nor small, just kind of there. He and my brother spent many afternoons in their grade school summers playing Whiffle ball and frisbee golf and other variations upon the front yard one-on-one competition.
I opened the screen door to our house on one of these summer evenings to find the two of them squaring off in our front yard, yelling at each other about strikes or balls or the actual location of the home run line. The conversation had escalated into an argument quite quickly and Trevor was becoming increasingly upset. He stared hard at my brother as his face was growing more and more red. He began to yell.

"You think I care about that?" He screamed. "I don’t care about anything!"
"Wow, you’re super tough," my brother countered. "You’re a big man."

"Yeah, I am a big man," said Trevor. "I’m a real big man that doesn’t care about anything! In fact, you know what? You wanna kick me in the balls? I don’t even care about that! Kick me in the balls!"

My brother stared hard back. "Oh, I’ll kick you in the balls!"

"I wish you would! They’re right here, waiting for you to kick ‘em!" Trevor put his hands on both sides of his groin and spread his legs apart, leaving a triangle in between his hands where he had pulled his jeans tight against his equipment. He stood, waiting, and so did I. My brother’s fists were clenched and he was hopping around a little bit, clearly not sure of what to do. Then he reared back and kicked Trevor square in the nuts.

Before Trevor even thought to start crying, my brother had sprinted past me into the house. Trevor, in shock that he had actually been taken up on his offer, stared down at his groin for about three seconds, let out a guttural, piercing wail, and made a full on sprint across the street towards his parent’s house. I looked around, walked into the front yard, picked up the bat and ball, and tried to park one into the neighbor’s trees.