"I'm Only With Your Mom Because Of The Beaver"

My daughters are too young to understand this right now, but I live with the knowledge that some day, they will have to know the truth.

I remember it like it was yesterday. June 1, 1996. I was supposed to go out with the boys that night, hit up some bars, meet a nice girl and, God willing, talk her out of her panties. But instead I got a call from my mother:

"You're still going to the party tonight, right?"

"What party?"

"The birthday party. You promised your sister."

My sister's boyfriend was having a big birthday party and she expected the whole family to attend. Normally, I'd have blown it off. Normally, I would've said, "Who cares about her stupid fucking boyfriend? I've got places to be, girls to meet, panties to remove (God willing)."

But this was no ordinary boyfriend. This was the Beaver.

You see, my sister had been dating Jerry Mathers, who by the age of 9 had become world famous for playing Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver on TV's "Leave It To Beaver." They met at a play in San Diego. She had no idea who he was. He found this novel. Fireworks.

So I went to the party, chatted up the Beav, bummed a smoke off Eddie Haskel (he's a cop now in the San Fernando Valley). Jay Leno was supposed to be there, but the bastard was a no-show. By about 9:15 I had grown weary of the festivities and was about to page my friends to see if I could join them (yes, I said "page" - back then you only had a cell phone if you were a doctor or a drug dealer).

But then, something happened. I was at the bar, soaking up Led Zeppelin anecdotes from a burned-out ex-hippie named Rob Foster - apparently his family had been Hollywood royalty back in the day - when an attractive young woman approached. She ordered some wine, said hello to Rob - they had been chatting earlier about the Grateful Dead - and he introduced us. Her name was Ryan. One look into her eyes and I was GONE. She was smart, beautiful, funny, upbeat and positively magnetic. But her eyes sealed the fucking deal. Deep pools of carribean blue, accented with faint green rings at the center, they bored into my soul and made me feel both at peace and wildly restless all at the same time.

Or maybe it was the Heineken.

Whatever it was, every ounce of poise seeped out of my pores as I tried to talk to her. I abandoned any attempt at witty repartee and just asked questions for a while. Soon, her relaxed demeanor put me at ease and I stopped with the Q&A, demonstrating that I was not in fact a reporter about to write a story on her life. The conversation started to flow between us and it suddenly occurred to me that I could not let this woman go. The much-too-handsome bartender handed her another drink and they exchanged some flirtatious words. A wave of panic rushed through me, and I realized I was jealous of the slick sonuvabitch. Me? Jealoius? What was going on?

Luckily, a few other people approached the bar and monkey-boy had to get back to work. She looked glad to be rid of him and we resumed our conversation. We learned that even though we were both in Los Angeles, we had each lived in Newport Beach at one point, and that we actually had friends in common... and that's when I cut her off mid-sentence and blurted out "Can I call you sometime?"

What a Neanderthal! It was ill-timed and hasty. I sounded desperate. Jeez, what a dumbfuck! I blushed. She blushed. There was a moment of extremely awkward silence... before she smiled and said, "OK."

Whew, what a relief. I almost fucked that up. Then the ex-hippie butted in and actually said these words: "I'm going to be at your wedding someday!" Considering that I did evenutally marry her, that was pretty goddamned amazing. But at the moment all I wanted to do was scream, "Shut up you fucking hippie!" Instead I borrowed a pen from the bartender and wrote down her number (take that monkey-boy!). Good timing because someone called her away and she excused herself with a simple "Nice to meet you."

We played it cool the rest of the night, but I couldn't stop thinking about her. Everything I did from that point on was to score points with Ryan. I played the good son and brought mom a plate of food, I talked to a lonely old lady for ten whole minutes (ick!), and at one point I even slow-danced with Jerry's 10 year old daughter, pretending not to notice that Ryan was watching from nearby. I was pulling out all the stops. Ryan would be mine.

A week later we went on our first date. A nice Italian dinner, a bottle of expensive wine and a play: George Bernard Shaw's "Arms and the Man." We kissed sweetly. Talked all night. It was classy.

Now, almost ten years later, we're married with two beautiful daughters. We're more in love than ever before.

I ran into Jerry Mathers recently. He and my sister are no longer together, but he looked at me, Ryan and our kids and just shook his head. "You know, if I hadn't had a birthday party you two would've never found each other."

I'll go you one further, Jerry: if you hadn't been the effing Beav, I would've never gone to your birthday party.

So, as I started out saying, one day I will have to explain this to our children. That their existence came about because of a little slice of Americana called "Leave it to Beaver" and the fact that their father is a big ol' Star Effer.