the delivery room

BY DAN INDANTE

Here's the deal: guys should not be allowed in the delivery room when their kids are born. When dudes think about their woman's vagina, they want to envision a 19-year-old blonde virgin running through a field of daisies. They don't want to know that the reality is blood and guts and gore and a remake of Alien.

It's a relatively recent phenomenon to have the husband (or boyfriend, or the guy the woman met for 12 minutes on a booze cruise) in the actual room when the kid's delivered. When I was born, my dad was in the parking lot, smoking Marlboros, eating raw meat, and shaving with a butter knife. He had a son being born? Screw that, he was on a pay phone with a client trying to get a job installing toilets.

Nevertheless, times change and community property laws have made it difficult to just walk away from the bleating shrew in her ninth month of pregnancy. So, when my time as the expectant dad rolled around, I reluctantly accompanied my wife to the hospital. After filling out a forest's worth of paperwork, they wheeled us into a room that had more electronic equipment than an episode of CSI. I figured it's just a kid, we're not splitting the friggin' atom here, are we? But I guess I'd rather have a tech expo in there than a Guatemalan chick banging a lizard against a hot towel and chanting. As you'll see, it turned out to be a good thing later on.

Anyway, my wife had that pre-birth courage where she loudly proclaimed to all who'd listen that she was going "au naturel" and would push the kid into the real world without the use of any painkillers. Hoo-rah!! However, when the first contraction hit, my wife's head spun around like Linda Blair and she drank damn near a gallon of the epidural before the doctor could reach for the hypodermic needle.

We spent most of the rest of the day dealing with false contractions, which was great because there was a deli across the street that served all-you-can-eat pickles. But, eventually, the kid had the decency to start making her way down the tube. Just like a woman to spend all stupid day getting ready for the party.

Now me, being a dude, had no idea what to do or when to do it. The only thing I did know is that I had remembered to charge up the battery on my video camera, and I wasn't getting near any of the action until my new baby daughter was 100 yards clear of my wife's lady parts. I recall a bit of a commotion with the doctors right before the birth, but I was too busy staring up at the ceiling hoping that I wouldn't catch a glimpse of the bloody potato sack making its way out of my formerly lithe wife.

Well, the kid comes out and they immediately throw her into an incubator which, for all I knew, could've been an iron lung or a Cray Supercomputer. The thing had more controls than an F-18 and I'm thinking: "Hmm. That's a bit of overkill, isn't it?" But, assuming any child who comes from me will be perfect in every respect, I jumped into the game and started filming my new daughter, figuring the video would be worth something when she won the first of her three Olympic soccer gold medals. I look over at my wife, assuming she'll congratulate me on my courage or mention my Ansel Adams-like skill with the camera but, actually, she's crying.

Then I realize: My kid hasn't cried yet. Holy sh*t, she hasn't breathed yet!!! The nurse taps me on the shoulder and says: "You shouldn't be filming." Always observant and informed, I ask: "Why not?" She says: "Um, sir. We're trying to revive your baby." She would've punched me in the mouth, but I'm sure she'd have felt bad about pummeling the retarded. Turns out, the iron lung is what they use when the baby's born near death. Ummmmmmmm, yeah.

Despite having an IQ hovering around room temperature, I was able to determine that my daughter had been born with the cord around her neck and nearly strangled herself upon arrival. I slumped down on the couch, immediately wondering whether I could return the crib and stroller and get some money back. My wife looked over, knew EXACTLY what I was thinking, and threw a bed pan at me.

Miraculously, the crack team of doctors and nurses, who had all shown up in the room within 3 seconds of somebody pressing a button alerting the entire ward that the moronic father's kid was in trouble, had my daughter bouncing and crying -- and breathing -- in less than a minute. I was still too stunned and scared and flat-out stupid to say much other than "thank you" about a million times. They all took turns spitting on me and the video camera as they walked out. My wife would've done it, too, had her daughter not flatlined just minutes before and been saved by the greatest set of OBGYNs the world has ever known.

The good news is that, after the 30-second nightmare, my daughter made it through like a champ. Her eyes were open and, true to her female form, she was grabbing for my wallet before we made it out of the nursery.

Fifteen months later, my son was born in the same hospital, and I spent the whole day in the parking lot, shaving with a butter knife and scarfing down all the pickles I could eat.