Dave Barry's Guide to Marriage And/or Sex (3 page)

I have a writer friend, Clint Collins, who once proposed that, as a quick “touch-up” measure, you could cut a piece of two-by-four the same width as the vacuum cleaner and drag it across the carpet to produce those little parallel tracks, which as far as Clint could tell were the major result of vacuuming. (Clint was also unaware for the first 10 or 15 years of his marriage that vacuum cleaners had little bags in them; he speculated that the dirt went through the electrical cord and into the wall.)

What this means is that, if your live-together relationship is going to work, both of you must be sensitive to the special needs of the Cleaning Impaired. Unfortunately for you women, this means you must spend many hours patiently going over basic cleaning concepts that may seem simple and obvious to you, but will be baffling mysteries to the Cleaning Impaired person, such as:

1. Where clean dishes actually come from.

2. What you can do with used pizza boxes besides stack them in the corner of the living room for upwards of two years.

3. How some people do more in the way of cleaning the bedroom than simply spray a few blasts of Right Guard deodorant on the two-foot-high mound of unlaundered jockey shorts.

And so on. The best way to avoid conflict is if you make up lists that state clearly what cleaning chores each of you will be responsible for. At first, the Cleaning Impaired person’s list should be fairly modest:

NORMAL PERSON’S WEEKLY CHORE LIST

1. Clean kitchen.

2. Clean bathroom.

3. Clean entire rest of domicile.

CLEANING IMPAIRED PERSON’S WEEKLY CHORE LIST

1. Don’t get peanut butter on sheets.

Speaking of peanut butter, another area where a first-time live-together couple can run into trouble is the kitchen. Here again we need to confront the depressing fact that, despite all the progress that has been made in other areas, such as coeducational softball, when it comes to sharing equally in food-preparation responsibilities, many men are still basically scumballs. I know I am. This was driven home to me on a recent Thanksgiving day, when my family had dinner at the home of friends named Arlene and Gene.

Picture a typical Thanksgiving scene: on the floor, three small children and a dog who long ago had her brain eaten by fleas are running as fast as they can directly into things, trying to injure themselves. On the television, the Detroit Lions are doing pretty much the same thing. In the kitchen, Arlene, a prosecuting attorney responsible for a large staff, is doing something to a turkey. Surrounding Arlene are thousands of steaming cooking containers. I would no more enter that kitchen than I would attempt to park a nuclear aircraft carrier, but my wife, who runs her own business, glides in very casually and picks up exactly the right kitchen implement and starts doing exactly the right thing without receiving any instructions whatsoever. She quickly becomes enshrouded in steam.

So Gene and I, feeling guilty, finally bumble over and ask what we can do to help, and from behind the steam comes Arlene’s patient voice asking us to please keep an eye on the children. Which we try to do. But there is a famous law of physics that goes, “You cannot watch small children and the Detroit Lions at the same time, and let’s face it, the Detroit Lions are more interesting.” So we would start out watching the children, and then one of us would sneak a peek at the TV and say, “Hey! Look at this tackle!” And then we’d have to watch the Instant Replay to find out whether the tackled person was dead or just permanently disabled. By then the children would have succeeded in injuring themselves or the dog, and this voice from behind the kitchen steam would call, very patiently, “Gene, please watch the children.”

I realize this is awful. I realize this sounds just like Ozzie and Harriet. I also realize that there are some males out there, with hyphenated last names, who have evolved much further than Gene and I have, who are not afraid to stay home full-time and get coated with baby vomit while their wives work as test pilots, and who go into the kitchen on a daily basis to prepare food for other people, as opposed to going in there primarily for beer. But I think Gene and I are more typical. I think most males rarely prepare food for others, and when they do, they have their one specialty dish (spaghetti, in my case) that they prepare maybe twice a year in a very elaborate production number, for which they expect to be praised as if they had developed, right there in the kitchen, a cure for heart disease.

It’s very simple, men. If you want to have a decent and fair live-together relationship, you have to start cooking whole entire meals all by yourself on a regular basis. And by “meals,” men, I do not mean “Kraft Cheez Whiz eaten directly from the jar with a spoon.” I mean meals that somebody else would eat. That even your mom would eat.

This is not as hard as you think, men. All you need to do is learn some recipes.

Recipe Number One: Food Heated Up

This dish has long been a specialty of women and the great chefs of Europe, who have learned that, with a few exceptions, such as grape soda, almost all food tastes better when you heat it up. In fact some foods, such as baked potatoes, are very hard to eat any other way.

TO PREPARE: Get enough units of food to feed yourself and the person you are living with. Now select a pot that you feel is the correct size. Now put this pot back and select another one, because the one you selected first was wrong. (Trust me here, guys. In 15 years, I have never once selected an initial pot that my wife did not feel, based on her vastly superior experience and hormonal instinct, was the wrong size.)

Okay. Now try to put the food unit inside the pot. (CULINARY HINT: For extra elegance, try removing the food unit from its can or wrapper first!) If it fits, cook it on top of the stove on “medium” heat until just before it overflows the top and wrecks the stove. If it doesn’t fit into the pot, it’s probably a turkey, a roast, or a ham, which you can tell by counting the number of legs and referring to this convenient chart:

Turkey 2 medium 

Roast 0 medium 

Ham 0 medium

These larger foods should be placed inside the little room under the stove (the “oven”) and cooked on “medium” heat until just before they fill the entire dwelling area with dense acrid smoke.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If the food unit is, in fact, a turkey, be sure to check inside and remove the traditional Surprise Packet of yuckola blobs that is always found in the interiors of deceased frozen turkeys for reasons that nobody can really explain. One theory is that it is placed there as a protest by dissatisfied workers at the turkey manufacturing plant. A more plausible theory is that the blobs are actually dormant baby turkeys. Most savvy chefs immediately throw them into the garbage or flush them down the toilet, which incidentally is how there came to be giant albino turkeys in the New York City sewer system whose only natural enemies are the alligators.

Recipe Number Two: Two Kinds of Food in the Same Meal

Yes! This really is possible! In fact, your extremely advanced chefs will sometimes serve as many as three kinds of food, although I do not recommend that you attempt this yourself.

TO PREPARE: Follow the recipe for Food Heated Up, except use two food units, two pots, two stoves, etc. The trick is to select foods that “complement” each other.

Okay. We’ve covered the two biggest potential problem areas involved in living together, namely dirt and food. This leaves sex, which in the interest of decency we will put in a separate chapter.

I’m afraid that, in this chapter, we must talk about sex in a very explicit manner, because we want to expand the Frontiers of Human Understanding and also we want to sell as many books as possible to adolescent boys. This means we are going to have to use certain highly clinical sexual terms, such as “puberty” and “mollusk”, which can lead to arousal in some instances. So if you have a shred of decency in you, you’ll want to stop reading and go make fudge or something until this chapter is over. You’d better leave right now, because the heavy pornography starts almost immediately after these asterisks.

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Still with us, eh? Ha Ha! Don’t feel ashamed. You’d be surprised at some of the readers we get in this chapter.

Okay. Now that we’ve cleared out the religious fanatics, let’s take a look (so to speak) at ...

The major male sexual organs are the testaments, the nomads, the doubloons, the inner tubules, the vasal constrictors, the reversion unit, and of course the Main Organ, or “wiener.”

Men are very protective of these organs. This is because Mother Nature decided, apparently as a prank, to place them on the outside of the male body, where they are most likely to get hit by baseballs, or punched by small children, or even—this makes me cringe, just thinking about it—attacked by crazed birds. And what is worse, Mother Nature made these organs extremely sensitive.

You know how women are always talking about the Pain of Childbirth, and how awful it is, and how men will never really understand it? Well, we men don’t wish to make a big deal about this, but if you women really want to experience pain, you ought to try being male and taking a line drive to the privates. Yes sir. When this happens in a professional baseball game, and the player is down on the ground, writhing in agony, obviously clutching his private parts, the color commentator always says to the announcer: “Looks like he had the wind knocked out of him, Ted.” But the male spectators know better, and if you look around you’ll notice that they’re all hunched over protectively, thousands of them, as if a sudden epidemic of Bad Posture Disease has swept through the crowd.

What this means is that, as they are growing up, males develop an attitude about their sexual organs very similar to the one that over-protective, doting parents have about their children. This is not a problem when the organs are young and innocent and basically dormant. But things change drastically when we reach puberty.

Puberty generally occurs in males about two years late. By this I mean it occurs about two years after it occurs in females, which is somewhere around sixth grade. I remember at the end of my fifth-grade year, when we left for summer vacation, and the boys and girls were all just about even in the race for adulthood. But when we got back the next fall, the girls suddenly, out of the clear blue sky, were all a foot taller and had somehow acquired bosoms and God only knew what else. It was as though they had all attended Summer Bosom Camp.

This gives the girls an unfair head start. They get two whole years in which to get used to having sexually advanced bodily parts, and the result is they develop a certain maturity about it, a coolness of judgment, a savoir faire, that they retain for the rest of their lives.

Boys, meanwhile, are condemned to two years of wandering around the corridors of the junior high school, their eyes cruelly positioned by Mother Nature at just about bosom level, and consequently they develop this tremendous yearning to catch up. When puberty finally strikes them, this pent-up desire has become so powerful that they develop erections that last for an average of slightly over three years. You men out there know what I’m talking about. The main reason adolescent males carry school books is they need something to hold in front of them.

Okay, then. To summarize what we have, in the typical healthy young male: We have a creature who tends to be highly indulgent toward his sexual organs, and we have organs that are semi-out-of-control much of the time, and almost always Ready to Party. Now let us contrast this with the sexual development of the typical female, starting with a discreet and sensitive examination of ...

I don’t know what the major female sexual organs are. I get extremely confused just looking at the diagrams. Frankly, I don’t think anyone really has a handle on the entire female reproductive system, because the organs are located inside the female body, where you can’t see them. The only way a woman can have even a vague idea of what’s going on in there is to have a gynecologist root around with primitive implements, and perhaps even call in an associate for consultation (“Hey Bob! Come in here! What do you make of this?!”).

So in contrast to men, who are always touching themselves and giving themselves little nicknames, women develop an attitude of almost clinical detachment about their reproductive systems.

Furthermore, where men’s organs seem to be carefree and impulsive, women’s are serious and hard-working, with a single-minded devotion to the idea of having a baby. No matter what the woman is doing on the outside—having a career, writing a novel, bowling—her organs are busy on the inside, gathering food for the baby, fixing up the baby’s room, etc. At the end of each month they sigh, throw everything away and start all over again, thus sending the woman the friendly biological reminder: “Okay. Fine. Go ahead and have your fun out there. Don’t mind us in here, slaving away, trying to ensure the very survival of the human race.”

In summary, then, we see that, because of the location and nature of their respective organs, women tend to have a more serious, thoughtful, and responsible attitude toward relationships than men do. I realize this is an absurd generalization, but my feeling is that if we can’t have absurd generalizations, we might as well not even bother to write books.

NOTICE: THE FOLLOWING MATERIAL IS OF A SEXUALLY EXPLICIT NATURE THAT MAY AROUSE PRURIENT INTERESTS IN READERS WHO HAVE INSUFFICIENT CONTROL OF THEIR URGES.