Damien Galeone

I am walking down the corridor to my office and practicing my smile. It’s the teachers’ first day back after summer holidays and I am determined to go into it with an optimism reserved for sitcoms from the 1950s. I turn the corner.

“Hello!” I say to my colleague. But there is something afoot. She is surrounded by three other women and when she stands to greet me they demur like tanned-bosomed handmaidens to Colonel Kurtz. Her belly hangs low, like a Galeone man stepping away from a buffet of salty carbohydrates and deep-fried poultry.

“Hi,” she says. She caresses the dipping arc of her belly, and I mimic the action with mine. She seems a bit jealous that I appear to be in a further stage of fetal development and we square shoulders. I feel certain that her handmaidens are going to purify the floor with salt so that we can slam bellies against one another until one of us falls into a sushi-eating crowd.

No Sumo battle occurs, so instead I shout, “Congratulations!” (With 1950s sitcom optimism)

Pause

And then, “Oh my God, you’re pregnant, right?”

In response, she begins emitting a glow that paralyzes me into a semiconscious state. Her handmaidens send forth a series of coos meant to hypnotize me while they scan my finger for a wedding band and telepathically audit my family background and medical history.

Before my consciousness fully dissipates I am stirred by a knocking at the door, where a massive-bossomed woman appears holding a baby.

My God, they’re multiplying – literally!

I get to my desk just as the cooing hits a murmur consistent to that of the Satanic Brides coaxing Jonathan Harker into bed. In defense, I slip into the warm and comforting bubble of Cracked.com.

I like babies in the same way that I like fire engines. I understand that they are good things, there is a need for them to exist and people seem to like them. But when one starts going off at an earth shattering volume, I want to be able to slip into a pub, watch a baseball game and wait for Doppler’s sweet relief. Furthermore, I am committed to the cleansing of only one rear end in this life and I am currently both sitting on it and scratching it.

The topic of having children is to adults what masturbation is to teenagers – nobody wants to directly ask you if you’re doing it, but everybody REALLY wants to know if you’re doing it.

So I guess this all adds up to one thing – a spawn from the likes of me seems, well, unlikely.

This is trouble, because to be involved with the creation of one seems to be a constant source of passive pressure. Nobody is actively making me have kids and most people won’t directly ask, but it often seems to be the true subject of many conversations I have. And after witnessing my attitude during these chats one must find me to be a confusing maelstrom of overt bachelorhood, spermicidal binge drinking and musical theater.

After a while at Cracked.com, I notice that the mother snaps away from the group to chat. She is friendly and oddly mobile for someone who just passed a human radio. She engages me in a conversation I’ve had over three hundred times since I turned thirty.

“Do you have any children?”

I appreciate her initial straightforwardness. “No,” I say, and then just for fun I wipe my brow and go, “whew.”

Consternated brow. “And you’re thirty…”

“Six,” I look at my watch, “damn near seven.”

“You have…” She’s leading me now, the way I lead students to the right synonym for painfully uncomfortable. I’m not exactly sure where she’s heading, but I decide to beat her there.

“A cat,” I think for a moment, “and possibly a mouse, and maybe a spider.” I decide to go on the offensive. “How old is your thingy there?”

“Six weeks old.” She looks proud.

“Can it clean its own butt yet?”

Awkward smile covering up an annoyed look.

“The cat cleans her own butt and the spider traps his own food.”

The conversation has ended.

The kid starts acting up, taking deep, painful, purifying breaths between each wail. I head through the door calculating the distance to the closest pub.

There’s got to be a game on somewhere.