TEAM LAST CALL

Between you and me, my wife didn’t really take turning 30 all that well. And when I say “didn’t take it all that well,” I mean she freaked out like a vampire caught in the sunlight. Shrieking, thrashing around, trying to bite through my neck – the whole deal. It was like living under the reign of Caligula, but with fewer beheadings.

I’m exaggerating, of course. There were at least as many beheadings.

Death and carnage lay all about. On the scale of natural disasters, my wife’s birthday ranked somewhere between the black plague and the giant meteor that killed all the dinosaurs. It was a full-on crisis, just a few horsemen short of the apocalypse. The only reason you didn’t hear about it on the evening news was that it got edged out by round-the-clock coverage of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ engagement. But it still got more coverage than the death toll in Iraq.

It’s been several months since my wife’s birthday, and I’m honestly still a little nervous to broach the subject. That little vein in the middle of her forehead is just now starting to swell back to its normal size.

When I first told my wife I was going to be writing about her birthday for my next column, her head started spinning around in circles and blood came out of our walls. Then she started talking backwards Latin and flinging large pieces of furniture around the room with her mind. Our poor little Jack Russell still hasn’t stopped shaking. Of course, that could just be because he’s a Jack Russell. And because I fed him a bag of espresso beans.

I realize I’m probably coming across as mean and insensitive. I mean, what kind of jerk talks this way about his own wife? This kind of jerk. Because the truth is, my wife thinks this kind of crap is funny, which is why she married me in the first place. Well, it was either that or my love handles and enormous forehead. I’m not really sure.

Actually, that brings us to the real reason why I’m writing about my wife’s 30th birthday: our marriage. Frankly, I’m starting to get a little worried about being the man my wife needs in her life now that she’s becoming a mature woman. Because 30 is the mark of adulthood, of responsibility. My wife is growing up, getting all reflective and sophisticated, yet I continue to be a mental toddler – which is good in that it qualifies me to be the leader of the free world, but bad in that it makes me an immature, bumbling idiot.

Assuming for a minute that it wasn’t my enormous forehead that reeled her in, the best thing I’ve got going for me is the ability to make my wife laugh, and I’m concerned that I might not always be able to do that the way I can now, short of taking off my clothes.

The fact is, I will never, ever stop laughing at flatulence. I’m a 29-year-old man who can be reduced to tears just from someone pretending to pass gas. The old hand-in-the-armpit, the old mouth-in-the-elbow – they get me every time. I’m an addict. I’m a toot-aholic. I’m hopeless.

So what if – I can hardly even bring myself to type this – but what if there comes a day when my wife no longer appreciates a good fart joke? Because unfortunately, my ability to produce them in bulk is pretty much my only marketable skill. The jokes, I mean.

What if my wife just plain outgrows me? What if her needs change? What if she starts to desire a different kind of man, one who knows the difference between a wrench and a screwdriver and can find the little thinger on your car where the oil goes without having to ask for help?

I did manage to grow some chest hair recently, which I think is a positive step towards manliness, but for every “good” hair I grow, an “evil” one pops up in places you don’t even want to know about. It’s a losing battle.

My wife is now spending large quantities of time “taking stock of her life” and planning out things like her career and her future family. As in, she’s planning on making actual babies, like the kind with the sticky little hands and scabby little knees that are always vomiting and pooping and getting lollipops stuck in their hair.

This presents a problem, in that I am nowhere near being prepared for parenthood. I have enough trouble changing my own underwear, let alone someone else’s. I still can’t even say the word “nipple” without giggling uncontrollably.

I need to do some growing up, is what it comes down to. And I need to do it quickly, before my wife’s biological clock starts chiming. I don’t want her to do anything rash just because I’m not good at things like “handling responsibility” or “remembering to put on pants.” I run to the mailbox every day to make sure there isn’t a package addressed to my wife from David Crosby.

Deep down, I know I can handle a child. I’ll be fine as long as I can just manage to stay at least one full day ahead of the baby developmentally. At least until it turns 7 or 8 and starts running around the house making fart noises, at which point I will be stuck in a perpetual state of shooting milk out my nose.

The day my wife outgrows my immature potty humor will be a dark day indeed. But I will cling to the hope that we will never see that day. I will keep the faith. I will not yield to the darkness. I will pass gas into the face of despair.

Meanwhile, I’m going to do my best to do some growing up of my own. Yes, I’m going to be a new man. A mature man. A responsible man. And I’m going to start right now by fixing the toilet upstairs that’s been running since June. Can you hand me that screwdriver? What? Oh, sorry. I mean wrench.