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I recall Josh pleading recently, “Please Mom – No!”

Yeah, please Elizabeth - No! I was silently pleading as well, although outwardly I had to maintain the same determination as my wife to fulfill the task at hand, no matter how badly I don’t want to do it. Josh will be 10 soon, and we’ve decided that it’s time - despite how young he may seem – for the dreaded Puberty Talk.

I never had the luxury of an exclusive sit-down sex talk with my old man, and thankfully so. It would have been excruciatingly awkward for us both. I learned about the birds and the bees the good old fashioned way – on the street. In my case, “the street” was the Playboy or Penthouse someone stole from their father’s secret drawer, or the half-destroyed Hustler magazine we actually found in the latrine at Boy Scout camp. Between whatever additional print media we could scrounge, G-rated romantic scenes from our favorite movies (which meant a lot of guessing at what wasn’t shown), and whatever scraps of information we could assemble from older siblings and their friends, my rag-tag imaginings of what real sexual intimacy entailed surely made the real thing, when it finally did arrive, only more perplexing.

But today kids have access to more information than ever. The internet, of course, but even Nickelodeon and Disney show tween-aged pop-stars clad like pole dancers. Josh and other kids his age are already immersed in this alarmingly nonchalant propagation of sex from virtually every commercial outlet aimed at young adults.

With all this in mind, we needed to get a jump on things while we still had a chance. Elizabeth had just the solution: a puberty book. What could be better than taking it right out of a book? At least I wouldn’t have to come up with any of this on my own. We would just sit down together and I’d read from ‘the book’. It sure sounded simple enough; as long as Josh didn’t ask too many questions that weren’t covered in the book, I’d be fine.

For this strategy we also had the help of the guidance counselor at his elementary school. Elizabeth had first approached Rob, asking if he wanted first shot at it, but he’s even more old-school than I am. So the responsibility of the Man’s Voice now rested squarely on my shoulders. I hoped to facilitate Josh’s first sex talk without messing him up too badly for the rest of his life.

“Here Josh, I’ve got the book and everything.” Elizabeth is steadfast and isn’t going to take no for an answer.

“What? What’s it called?” Josh is still trying to squirm his way out of this, but the book has him off guard.

“It’s called ‘What’s Going on Down There?’ Isn’t it great?”

“Nooooo!”

What’s Going on Down There – it’s as if my life has suddenly become a cross between the Brady Bunch and a Farrelly Brothers movie. .

A half hour later, after Josh’s best efforts to postpone his impending lecture, he and I are sitting alone in the quiet of his bedroom. It is a cloudy Sunday outside, but there is just enough light of the afternoon for us to see without any of the room’s lamps turned on.

I cradle the book in my hands – the full title is What’s Going on Down There?: Answers to Questions Boys Find Hard to Ask. It shows three cartoon boys of different ethnicities, all looking down toward their nether regions, which are obscured by the title is written – it’s quite funny. But in this dark bedroom, I feel heavy—will this day, this very moment before I open the cover and start reading, be Josh’s last bastion of childhood innocence? This is a kid who still builds Lego sets, watches Scooby Doo and climbs under the covers of our bed on Saturday mornings.

My fingers fidget. Josh stares around the room. There’s no time for second guessing. In the very room that I once had sex with a stripper in, as well as countless other unmemorable clumsy drunken trysts, I turn the cover and start:

“Chapter one – “

Josh rolls his eyes and I begin reading:

Chapter One – Your Body.

As you probably know, it takes both a man and a woman to create a baby. That’s because all the instructions necessary to form a baby’s body come from the man and half from the woman. These instructions are…

I look up. Josh is kicking his dangling leg, back and forth; I can see it out of the corner of my eye. He is staring up at the ceiling, with a somewhat detached expression. Thank god, I tell myself, relieved that Josh is more relaxed. I just hope he’s really listening and not repeating ‘I will not listen to the sex talk, I will not listen to the sex talk’ over and over in his head. I continue, and four pages in and I already feel indebted to the Puberty Book. I guess the best of both worlds would be for me to provide some of my own editorial comments as we go along, but I will have to pluck up the courage first. For now my fate, and more importantly Josh’s fate, is in the hands of the experts. Five more minutes of reading, and the chapter is done.

“Well that’s it – any questions?”

“No, not really,” he says looking down, his mind probably on video games or soccer. He gets up from the bed and heads for the door.

“Okay then, just let me know. Just so you know, tomorrow’s chapter is called ‘Body Changes’…”

“What?” Josh stops dead in his tracks. “Tomorrow?”, He looks petrified at the prospect of having to endure this on a daily basis.

“No, no - just kidding! We don’t have to do this again until next week” Relief washes over Josh’s face, then he saunters the rest of the way out, probably deciding that a week is no where near long enough. I know that’s what I’d be thinking if I were in his shoes—frankly, I’m the adult, and it’s exactly what I’m thinking.

Once Josh is gone I recap of the whole experience. On the whole it went as well as could be expected. I suppose anything above a complete train wreck is a success, but I now realize that getting through this first chapter was not as insurmountable a feat as I had imagined fifteen minutes ago. I can’t say for sure that Josh was wholeheartedly paying attention throughout, but I did make deliberate eye contact with him on some of the key points, even while emphasizing some of the more embarrassing passages like “…Both types of penises - circumcised and uncircumsized – work exactly the same way and equally well…”.

As much as I dread the awkwardness of the next nine weeks of puberty book readings, I am at the same time encouraged. This is one of the rare areas of his life that perhaps he and I alone will share, just us “men” – even if we never speak of it beyond these sessions. Sex and his changing body is a topic that I now own in a way, at least for the time being, and perhaps in the future he’ll confide in me when he encounters a difficult situation. I would think that by the time I’m done reading ‘Chapter 5: Having Sex’ out loud, that we’d be able to discuss just anything without blushing.

(This is an excerpt from "They Call Me Wheels", a memoir by Geoffrey E. Matesky, NOW AVAILABLE from iUniverse, Amazon.com, & Barnes & Noble (bn.com). If you are a bookseller and wish to obtain copies, please contact the sales department of my publisher, iUniverse.com for more details.)