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  My stepdad also had a buddy from the army who lived near us with his family. This dude had married a Vietnamese girl during the war, and she already had four kids when they got hitched. HPH (Howard Pierre Hyde) helped the family come to the States, and they actually lived IN OUR HOUSE for a while. Um, so let’s do that math for a second. Their family of six. My family of five. That’s a grand total of eleven people in that shit shack. As you can imagine, that didn’t last too long, so they skedaddled over to the trailer park (shout-out to Kid Rock!). And we had to go over to the trailer park and hang with these kids. Their names were, in order, Shin, Que, Trang, and Lan. Not exactly Manny, Moe, and Jack. They were close to our ages, probably like eight, seven, six, and four. I have to say, I barely remember these kids at all, but I recall Trang being kind of hot. I’m not even super into Asians like my friends all seem to be, but Trang drew some plasma down to my dick region. Always sporting a slutty barrette, barely knowing English. It all worked. I was too young to know about sex, but I knew I was digging her and things were getting tingly in wiener town. Her mom must have caught on because she never let me hang out with her. Shin and I hung out the most. He was around my age and he was the smartest one of that crew, so we had that to bond over. That year, Shin and I were even put ahead in school two grades for reading and math. (That’s right, folks, two grades, not one!) I’d be talking to the ladies in my third-grade class going, “Oh shit, look at the time. I’ve gotta scoot. Have to trot down the hall to fifth grade for reading and math. We’re doing a little thing called fractions, you wouldn’t understand. No big. Don’t wait up . . .” It was a pretty solid rap for a third grader.

  We had a pretty good run with old Howard, all in all. The sad part came when I was about fifteen and his therapists told Mom that Howie was getting worse, that he was a danger to us and to himself and that she should split. She got a divorce and it crushed him, but she had to keep her boys safe. He left for good after that. I felt bad. He was a good guy but seeing so much shit in the war fucked with him. All the kids liked the guy even though he was socially awkward. He had a good heart. My mom took it hard because she just wanted us to have a normal family and this latest sitch was coming to an end.

  Then one day, out of the blue, I got a bike in the mail. The tag said that it was from Sam Spade, my real dad. Shocking but I’ll take it! Then, the next day, a couch showed up. Hmm. From Sam again! Double hmm. This guy hadn’t given me anything more than a snow cone for ten years. WTF? Something was fishy. Then more shit appeared. It just kept coming. Soon enough, we got the news. Howard had used his hospital connections to make a fake ID to pose as my dad. He started sending us the shit Sam never provided for us when we were younger. Howard was so mad at Sam for ditching us, that this was his kooky way of helping us out while also getting back at him. Sam wound up getting thrown in jail until it was sorted out.

  The police eventually figured out the fraud and caught up to Howard. They cornered him in a motel somewhere in the Midwest. He didn’t give up; instead he quietly took the drugs he brought and killed himself. He had it all planned. It was pretty sad.

  I found out later he had tried to take his own life once before with a shotgun, but my mom had knocked it away just in time. That’s when he blew the hole through the closet ceiling in our house.

  A few years later my mom got so pissed at Sam that she finally talked a lawyer friend into helping her out to get some dough out of him. My dad hadn’t paid a cent of child support or alimony in years. She could never do anything about it, because she was broke. So this lawyer friend got my mom her day in court. Sammy trotted in with his flip-flops, Lacoste shirt (collar flipped up), Bermuda shorts, and Carrera sunglasses. The judge said, “Are you Sam Spade?” “Live and in person!” he smarmily replied. “Is it true you never paid this woman a dime in all these years since leaving her?” the judge asked. “Well, it’s tricky, Judge, you know how it is with the dune buggy payments and the brunches . . .” SLAM! (Gavel coming down, in case you were confused.) SIXTY DAYS IN JAIL! Sammy got dragged away. “Whhhaattt? What’s happening?? I can’t go to jail, I have a thing at noon. Come on, Judge, don’t do this!! BE COOL! YOU’RE A GUY!!” Sam only did about two days (like Paris Hilton) but it was a good scare. Apparently all it did was scare him back into the bars looking for women to pick up, but at least Mom tried.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MAMA’S BOY

  I’m probably a total mess today because growing up, my mom was the only one around most of the time. And believe me, my mom did her best, but I was really just a boy without a dad, drifting aimlessly around Arizona. Don’t get me wrong, I had waves of seeming tough, but I didn’t realize it. When I was ten and my brothers were twelve and fourteen my mom would drop us off at one end of the desert when she went to work and pick us up seven miles away at a Chevron station when she got done. This was only when she didn’t have a babysitter and I’m sure done out of desperation. The funny part was she would also let us each bring a gun and ammo so we could shoot shit along the way. We had a rifle, a pistol, and a shotgun. But also a canteen, bag lunch, and Bactine (in case of emergency!). I never thought twice about this other than remembering it was really fun, and today some fuddy-duddies might consider this “dangerous.” But down deep I was a mama’s boy. As much as I wish it wasn’t true it just happened. The things that dads teach sons, I never really learned. My mom loved to give us presents, but there wasn’t a man around to tell my mom, “Hey hon, that’s kind of a fruity gift for our son.” Once HPH was gone, the shotguns stopped appearing under the Christmas tree. She’s a mom and moms are chicks. And that’s cool, but Mom didn’t get the fact that for every female-slanted present you give a boy, you have to even it out with some solid manly gift. That’s just the rule. Like for every set of socks or tighty whities, there needs to be a punching bag or skateboard. One Christmas, she had a major brainstorm. “I’m going to take a school picture of each of the boys, and put it on something they can keep forever!!” (Zero logic, by the way. This reeks of something in SkyMall but there was no SkyMall then. Somehow, in the seventies we managed to get by without a Bug Vacuum or Hot Diggity Dogger; go figure.) So, dear Mom went out and got us each a specific thing with our photo emblazoned upon it. Bryan got a coffee mug with his mug plastered on it. Not horrible, although he was fourteen and probably wasn’t a major Sanka drinker at that point, but no biggie. Coffee mugs also hold Tang and Mr. Pibb, so he was fine. And, if necessary, he could bury it in the back of the cupboard and no one would be the wiser. Then came Andy’s turn. He woke up Christmas morning and unwrapped a pillow with one whole side as his school head shot. Wow. None of us knew what to say. We all just stared while Mom beamed. “Dontcha just love it?!” she said. Andy sort of shrugged thank you, knowing down deep this wasn’t a great one for show-and-tell . . . because Andy and Bryan were tougher and more manly than me. Bryan is the dude who got into fights all the time, and went to jail at fourteen, which I don’t even think is possible anymore. He’s also the dude who loves snakes and beer and tarantulas. Andy’s not quite as Paul Bunyan as Bryan, but he’s the dude who dressed cool, had a cool bike, and got girls two years older than him. So he knew that he had to bury that present in the closet, facedown so in the event anyone peeked in they wouldn’t see this smiling head shot.

  Next was my turn. The mama’s boy. The kid who slept in the same bed with her for three years too long. The one who held her hand in public five years too long. This was me. Anyway, she was the most excited about this present. Her call for me was a white T-shirt with a huge picture of ME in the left corner. YES, ME, FOLKS. The picture was a huge circle. Like monstrous. Underneath, it even said “Dave.” Just so you wouldn’t be confused that this guy was this guy. The room went silent. Even more silent than before. “It’s a picture of you! On a T-shirt! That you can wear!” She squealed. In case it wasn’t 100 percent obvious what this was, Mom had to make it extra clear. Surely she was concerned about our lack of reaction. Then she goes, “Wear it to schoo
l!” And I go, “Yeah, I should! That’d be fun!” because I was a little bit of a fruit, and I didn’t want to hurt my mom’s feelings, and because I didn’t have my dad around to say, “Fuck no, Judy, he’s not wearing that!” (Another reason I’m pissed at my dad.) I just rode on Mom’s wave of excitement. “Yeah, let’s do it!” I literally did everything except make the snaps like the guys did on In Living Color.

  So come Monday I’m about to go skipping off to school (not a total exaggeration, to be honest) and then somehow at the last millisecond my male chromosome somehow woke up and said to my brain, “Wait! Can we throw a shirt on over this? I mean, maybe a little button-down? Just something in case, worst-case scenario, a selfie on your shirt isn’t the coolest thing on the planet? Just . . . some sort of coverage. Just for me. The male part. I only pop up about once a year. Throw me a crumb.” I thought, Okay, fair enough. So I grabbed my button-down and I headed out the door with my baton. No . . . but seriously, I almost had one, that’s how unaware I was.

  So I rode my bike to school. (Yes, helicopter parents, it’s true and it worked just fine. Three miles!) Because it was Arizona, and it was scorching during normal recess time, we played kickball for our first hour of the day. (Trivia!) So I took a breather leaning against the backstop and I was like, “Wassup, gals, what’s happening, ladies? How was your weekend?” Ya know, just kicking back with some small talk, the normal daily drill, little flirting, a little gossip. And in a flash, everyone was back to playing kickball. By the way, I’m actually pretty good at kickball. (I don’t want to talk about that right this second but just FYI, I’m a little bit of an athlete . . . I mean you roll it down I’m going to kick it pretty hard, that’s all I’m saying. Seriously, some guys bounce it, which is illegal, but either way I’m going to whack it. So if you’re the pitcher, might as well roll it so you can sleep at night because you won’t be a cheater and either way you’re going to get shelled. But that’s neither here nor there.) So here I am, I’m kicking back, taking five, and now it was time to make my move. I was ready to unveil the little Spade face on my shirt. This is such a true story it scares the shit out of me because as I write it, I feel the pain. It feels like I’m having flashbacks to Operation Desert Storm. These were the last happy thirty seconds of my life. So I went to (sound effects of unbuttoning shirt) open it just a little bit, maybe one button, just so a tiny piece of my happening Farrah Fawcett feathered bangs were visible. I took a beat. There was no trouble yet, everybody was still playing the game, doing hopscotch, whatever. So I go, hey, everything’s cool. I popped one more button and started to take my shirt off. When it was about halfway off my shoulder, the entire school yelled, in unison, “QUEER!” And I freaked out, having no confusion over who they were yelling at. I buttoned that shirt back up so fucking fast my hands were a blur. I sprinted to my homeroom, dove under the desk, and had a full-blown panic attack. “OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD, ABORT MISSION!! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!!” My heart was racing in my tiny bird chest. My BP was like 10,000 over 50 million. Then, the entire school came pouring in, screaming “Holy shit! Spade’s got a picture of himself on his shirt! This is unbelievable!!” “No I don’t! No I don’t!” I screamed. “I promise I don’t!” And then I added this to make sure I was going to hell: “I SWEAR TO GOD I DON’T!”

  I was totally up against a wall. “Yes, you do!” everyone screamed back, and then came my second horseshit defense. “They can’t even do that! They can’t even put a picture on a T-shirt. Did you hear what he said? That’s crazy, he’s saying crazy things!”

  Meanwhile that’s all they can do to T-shirts, is put pictures on them. I would have gotten killed in cross-examination.

  I was out of my mind. So I sat there and they go, “We should put it in the time capsule . . . so in 2020 they can know what a fruitcake you were . . . for posterity.”

  Sad. But, I might dig that up. We should go dig that up.

  CHAPTER THREE

  LOSING MY VIRGINITY

  It was my senior year of high school. Class of ’82 (’82 drinks more brew!). (By the way, I wouldn’t mention the exact ancient year that I graduated but with Google it’s just a matter of time before girls figure out my age. For a while I tried to only date girls who didn’t have the Internet but that was too small a pool.) I wish I had gotten laid sooner, believe me. I had enough boners that went to waste to fill Cardinals Stadium. From roughly the sixth grade on I had a bone-anza of boners. (Side note to self: Copyright the word bone-anza for movies, books, T-shirts, and television. [Side side note: not to be confused with TV show Bonanza.]) I had probably upwards of hmmm, let me do the math (thinking out loud) 25 rods a day on school days, so times 5, and maybe 10 a day on weekends, hmm, bop bop bop . . . carry the 4 . . . equals 13.6 million pup tents. Of that number approximately 100 percent went to waste or were destroyed by any four pages of Penthouse. (Kaboom! Feel the rain on your skin . . . song from The Hills.) (Side note: Chicks in Penthouse were always somewhat sluttier/whorier than Playboy. Guys realize that at a young age. No one is marrying those gals, so they were smart to play that angle. They would also throw in a beaver-munching scene here and there to keep the customer happy. Which it did. Very. With those scenes I only needed three pages before shrapnel was flying.) With three boys, my house had dirty magazines stashed all over. Which made Easter mornings awkward. But finally, at the not so tender age of seventeen, I got some real-deal sex.

  Here’s how the beautiful magic went down. Every year, the guys in this club I was part of, called the . . . wait for it . . . The Gents (lame) . . . had a boxer party. We would each ask a girl to be our date and then we would go to the house of whoever’s parents were away and party in our boxers. (Not overly clever but at least it seemed like a decent theme.) We’d get shitfaced and trash the place. This is also the basic premise for Porky’s 4 (I’m guessing; I’ve only seen the first three). For this year’s boxer party, I asked a chick that I had a thing for. I had no idea if she dug me, though. She was actually pretty robotic, to be honest. Not tons of emotion or deep thoughts going on, but pretty and pleasant enough. That met all the criteria I needed. And she said yes. And she was a girl. Presumably with a pussy. So I was game. All pertinent boxes were checked. Also, in full disclosure, this girl had been nice enough to cough up a hand job about six months earlier so we were already headed in the right direction. She had seen my dick and seemed to be okay with it, so we were in business. (By the way, my prong is nothing to write home about. It’s sort of a shoulder shrugger.)

  I had pulled out my sword for her. Nothing.

  Crickets.

  She just sort of shrugged her shoulders and started tugging, like she was starting a lawn mower. Not a ton of finesse happening, but I wasn’t complaining. I could tell she got bored fast. Luckily we had no cell phones back then, or she would have been checking her Instagram feed the whole time. This amazing moment happened in the backseat of my buddy’s car on the way to Flagstaff with my two buddies Joe and Steve in the front seat. When I finally “finished” (gross term, BTW) it looked like a paint can had exploded on my Lacoste shirt. I hadn’t planned ahead. I just sat there. Didn’t know what to do. There was no Shout-ing it out. I had to take a walk of shame into 7-Eleven and buy paper towels. (Ah, romance.) The 7-Eleven guy didn’t flinch. I have a feeling this scenario had somehow played out before.

  So my robotic date and I walked to the boxer party from her house. At this point, I was still wearing my pants. It was good that we walked, since I planned on getting hammered. Not that it would have mattered since there were no drunk-driving laws back then. (Can you imagine? A world where you don’t get DUIs and can drive shitfaced? Again that was back when America was great. Cops didn’t give a fuck, just told you to focus on the road before high-fiving you.) I hit the partay in my Brooks Brothers ironed all-cotton boxers. I was a bit of a preppy asshole at this time, by the way.

  So, as all high school dates began, we immediately started playing quarters with shots of tequila. This is a dumb move
because you get plowed so fast and you don’t even get to build to a good buzz, but what did I know at seventeen? My buddies and I just wanted to look badass in our boxers in front of these chicks. I was feeling especially awesome because I finally had a date. (My luck with the ladies was pretty limited at this tender age. I had yet to get on a TV show, which makes dates with me at least bearable.) Pretty soon I’d had about seven shots, and my date was going on her fifth. Things started getting flirty and touchy and in the background I hear that Journey song “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’.” This is a Journey song I love. At the end of this song, Steve Perry goes “NA NA NA NA NANA, NANA NA NA NA, NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NAAAAA, NA NA NA,” etc., ad nauseam (it never actually fucking ends) so I said, “Wanna get out of here?” or something equally cool and James Deany. And she mumbled, “Okay.” Or “Help.” I can’t really recall.

  So we headed back to her place, which was a tough walk considering my rod, which is hard to hide in boxers. Her parents were asleep and we went into her room. We kiss, major French action. (P.S.: She wasn’t a bad kisser but some high school chicks over-French and it’s gross. Not that I’ve kissed any high school chicks lately or anything.) Eventually, she fell back on the bed and I took this as a written invitation for some action Jackson. I start to pull on her boxers. (Yeah, the chicks wore them, too. We were so cool.) And she lifted her hips! This is the best move in history. Every guy waits for this move, because it means that she’s helping, and it’s green-light city. Underneath the boxers, she was wearing panties. Back in those days, this meant serious mega-drawers. Like five inches of fabric on each side and about twenty in the dumper. And speaking of mega, her bush was sort of out of control, too. It puffed out so much that her panties looked like an airbag had gone off. None of this bothered me a bit, of course, because underneath that airbag was a vajayjay and my ween was hopefully headed for an air strike.