I was telling the truth, though. Cheryl and I weren’t having sex. Sure, we were necking and petting, to use the terminology then still in use. But that was it. Intimacy was new for both of us and I didn’t want to push Cheryl or rush ourselves as a couple.
As my relationship with her continued, Dad became more sympathetic, even though he and Mom remained united in their clampdown. Just in case I did choose to become sexually active, he wanted me to be prepared. So, in the same plainspoken way that he explained masturbation and the bathroom graffiti at Desilu Cahuenga to me, he sat me down for another talk. First, he presented me with a copy of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* （*But Were Afraid to Ask）。 This was a recently published book by a doctor named David Reuben that had become an international bestseller, the first mainstream sex manual that wasn’t considered dirty or deviant.
“Listen, you don’t have to be embarrassed by sex, and this book will answer a lot of questions you may have,” Dad said. “It’s good to have the answers because sex is a natural part of life. If you ever have other questions, let me know.”
I never did hit up Dad for advice—that was just too uncomfortable to contemplate—but I avidly paged through the book. Still, I couldn’t bear my parents’ rules about how much time I got to spend with Cheryl.
So I developed some workarounds.
For starters, I pretended that I had found religion. We were not churchgoers in our household. But Cheryl went with her dad every Sunday and was, in those days, pretty pious and hardcore—sufficiently so that she was genuinely a little worried about my soul. So I told my parents that I had become interested in Cheryl’s Southern Baptist faith and wanted to go to church with her. They couldn’t object to their boy going to church, could they?
Even this proved to be a difficult negotiation. Mom and Dad said that I could go as long I came back immediately after church let out. I managed to pry out of them an allowance of half an hour of further time with Cheryl on Sundays beyond church.
Next, I declared that I was trying out for the cross-country team at Burroughs. Not because I enjoyed running. I had a scheme. To try out, I would need to train, right? Mom and Dad permitted me an hour and a half in the afternoons to go running. So I put on my shorts and running shoes and jogged over to Cheryl’s house, which was only a mile and a half away. Then I would spend about an hour hanging out with her. When my time was almost up, Cheryl drove me back to within a couple blocks of my house. From there, I sprinted pell-mell up to our door so that my face was convincingly flushed and my hair sufficiently sweaty. “Whew, good workout!” I said when I walked in, bending over to rest my hands on my knees as I breathed deeply. I don’t think my folks bought it for a second. But they tolerated it.
IT TOOK SOME time for my parents to reach détente with Cheryl, or with the idea of Cheryl and me as a couple. But simply by sticking together, Cheryl and I demonstrated that we were for real. It was one thing for Mom and Dad to have doubts about a pair of moony sixteen-year-olds and quite another to question our commitment by the time we were nineteen and still inseparable.
One notable moment in the thawing process involved our monkey. Yes, you read that right. Cheryl and her dad kept a pretty bizarre array of animals at their place: an anteater, skunks, a snapping turtle that lived on a diet of beef heart, and a mature woolly monkey named Willie. There was a local pet store that we enjoyed visiting, to check out the exotic birds and reptiles that they had for sale. One day, Cheryl and I dropped in and saw that the store had a new occupant: a juvenile woolly, a female. Cheryl swooned over this beautiful little creature with deep, soulful eyes.
So I decided to surprise Cheryl. I returned to the store alone and bought the monkey for $500. That’s something I would never do now; doing so would support a black market of cruel animal traffickers. But it was perfectly legal then, and Sugar, as we named her, was a great companion, gentle and fun to be around. She lived well into the years when Cheryl and I got married and moved in together; she was basically our first child.
When Cheryl was still living at her dad’s, I asked my parents if she could bring Sugar on one of her visits to our house. I promised them that Sugar would wear a diaper indoors, just in case she felt the urge to go. They said yes.