DADWAGON

OK, so Slate is only trying to keep you from getting laid if you’re trying to bed your child’s babysitter, but still.

I was somehow elected by DadWagon to take on this topic, I think out of some confusion: I said earlier that a previous babysitter had a crush on my son, not me crushing on the babysitter. And, really, I don’t know what the babysitter scene is like outside of New York, but we don’t really have barely-legal teen babysitter/cheerleader types in Gotham, so the whole American Beauty thing just doesn’t apply.

What does apply here and everywhere is that widowers raising children, like the dad who wrote to Dear Prudence’s column, are heroes. And heroes deserve to get laid (that’s why this woman slept with 300 NY Firefighters).

Here’s what the widower has to say about the babysitter, 24:

She just told me she has a serious crush on me and is restless in her relationship. She has also made feints into discussions about sex with me, which I’ve brushed away. She is very attractive, and I have been completely alone since my wife passed, so this is pretty awesome on about 100 levels.

Can you tell how happy the guy is? You can practically hear him smiling through his words. Not even a columnist with Prude in her name could rain on that parade, right? Wrong. Her answer, in part:

I’m afraid pursuing this young woman, awesome though it may sound, is a bad idea on about 100 levels… Hooray that your sap is running again. So use the motivation she’s provided you to start looking for someone more suitable to date.

Now, readers of DadWagon know that I have name-checked sex advice columnist Dan Savage before (though truth be told I doubt he knows/remembers me from our brief overlapping time at the Stranger). Savage sometimes gets a bad rap for advising people to break up too much. I don’t believe that, and I applaud him for doling out the best Valentine’s Day advice of the year this time around: dinner/wine/chocolate AFTER sex, not before. So simple! So smart! He deserves all the joy this unrelated but awesome news will give him this week.

Savage would, I think, have answered this differently. And I think maybe Prudie deserves a bit of  a bad rap for keeping widowers from having sex. Yes, she’s usually somewhat measured and non-hysterical (although it’s easy to come off as sex-positive when your readers are concerned about mental adultery). But I disagree with her here: there’s no reason why sex couldn’t be good for both the dad and the sitter. Yes, it would complicate things. But sex and relationships are always complicated, and in this case there are no workplace harassment laws he’d have to deal with. She’s more than legal age, he’s more than deserving. Let them work out the sex/childcare conundrum in whatever manner they choose. Like adults.

Of course, in a week where Matt and the rest of us have been called cocksitters more than once, maybe I’m just unclear on what duties being a babysitter actually entails.

And so, once again, I’m about to head off on a long trip. Eleven days this time—no wife, no baby. It’s hard to say if it was like this last time—that was back in, what, October or November—but I guess I’m kind of sad. When Sasha was just a little pre-sentient nugget, I knew she’d hardly even notice I was away.

Now, though, I was just getting into the habit of picking her up from day care, and hearing her say “Daddy” and all that stuff that I hate getting all emotional about. (Almost crying, almost crying!) And today, I’ve just heard from Jean, Sasha burst into tears at day care when Jean tried to leave. I guess this is how it’s going to go, easy partings balanced by crushing ones.

Let’s just hope the scales are re-tipped in my favor when I return—melancholy good-byes are sometimes worth it for ecstatic reunions.

I had, like everyone, a rather complicated childhood. After my parents divorced, my mother, for reasons only she can account for, decided to move my brother and I from New York City to a small town in the Bible Belt. I split the remainder of my childhood between there and the city.

While this was unpleasant at times and always confusing, it did have a certain upside. I learned from a young age to travel, to adapt to new surroundings, and unlike most New Yorkers (and contrary to some of my earlier posts here) I learned that civilization–yes, it’s true–can exist outside of New York. Perish the thought.

One of the drawbacks, of course, was that I never really fit in anywhere. I wasn’t entirely a New Yorker, and well, no one from outside of the South ever becomes a southerner, no matter how much money you tithe to the Klan.

That said, semi-outcasts always find their niche, I guess, and I fell in with a good group of guys down south. One of them, a real Tom Sawyer type, had this fantastic idea to recruit his elementary school friends for a little movie project he was working on: a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. He would play Indiana, and another friend, a year older, would be Belloq and would direct. As the sole Jew on the project (excluding my brother), I was given the role of the Nazi Toht (this could also have been because I fit into the costume better than the director’s brother; or anti-Semitism. We report. You decide). I won’t go too much into this whole thing, as there’s been loads written about it. If you’re curious, just google “Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation,” or look here, or here, or here.

I’m not really interested in writing about the movie, per se (Jim Windolf did a fine job of that in his article in Variety Fair). What I’m thinking of today is the experience of being out of the city, and how important that was to me. JP’s, unlike me, is going to grow up a pure-breed New Yorker, which is good in some ways, but can also be rather limiting.

My ex-wife doesn’t really like to travel, and the custody arrangement we have with each other makes it very difficult to take JP away on my own. For better or for worse, and until he’s old enough to voice an objection, he’s going to be city-bound, and with winter hanging on with such tenacity, that makes me sad. Sorry, JP, hopefully I’ll be able to remedy the situation some day.

Why the photo above? Well, to make a very long story short, when people started paying attention to the movie a few years back, my Tom Sawyer friend had the very meta idea of making a movie about the making of our movie. I was attempting to make a go of things in Los Angeles as a screenwriter, and he asked me and my writing partner to come up with a script. As it happened, the former director, the guy on the right, didn’t like the screenplay  (admittedly, it was pretty bad), and when a major Hollywood producer came calling, the three fellas above decided to cut me out, sell their life rights to the Big Shot, and go visit Mr. Spielberg quite by themselves. Not to steal their light–they were the movers behind the film without a doubt, but it’s kind of a shame, as now I’m no longer friends with any of these fine fellows. All of which is besides the point, but figured I should explain.

Proof you don’t need babies in bars to encounter the shit-smeared in Brooklyn.