One of the great disappointments of my life is that I came of age in the 1970s, just one year too late for Red Highway.
For those of you too young to know about Red Highway, this was an infamous movie that they used to show in Driver’s Ed classes in high school to scare teenagers into safe driving habits. The makers of the movie obviously realized that teenagers love scary movies, so this one would have to be particularly shocking to make any kind of impact. As I’ve already said, I was one year too young to actually see this movie when I took Driver’s Ed, but as I understand it, it went something like this:
Narrator with Booming Voice: “Each year, thousands of America’s young people are killed needlessly by communism and unsafe driving practices. They are turning our country’s roads into… [scary music] A RED HIGHWAY!!!!!!!”
[A series of black and white photos of accident scenes flash by in quick succession, each showing a disturbing but vague dark stain on the pavement.]
State Trooper With a Crew Cut Standing in the Middle of a Burning Debris Field: So why are American teenagers so stupid? We’re really not sure. Perhaps they think danger is “fun” or “cool” [he makes little quotation-mark movements with his fingers at this point] or they just want to “fit in”. Suzie here [he holds up a blood-stained, partially charred class picture of a girl in a tight sweater] thought she would drive to a little “party” after the prom. She didn’t know she was driving on… [scary music] A RED HIGHWAY!!!!!!!”
[At this point, most Driver’s Ed students would be so weirded out that anything – a box of puppies or a field of daisies – would frighten them, but the geniuses behind Red Highway were completely merciless and showed wonderfully graphic footage of each step of Officer McGruff’s little tour into madness.]
“We aren’t entirely sure why Suzie had a running chainsaw in her lap, but as you can see, she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt when her car hit the gasoline tanker. She was thrown through the windshield [pointing] here and landed here, here and over here. As you can see, a cargo of thumbtacks had been spilled onto the roadway – possibly by communists – so there is a clear trail [pointing at a long, red streak in the road] to follow as we look for her. As you can see, by the time we found her, the coyotes had already gotten to her. We’re still looking for her head.”
Voice From Off-Camera: “Found it!”
State Trooper: “All of it?”
Voice From Off-Camera: “Um… Never mind!”
From this point on, rumor had it, the movie got really intense. You can understand why not getting to see this movie has been one of the great regrets of my life.
I’ve missed my window of opportunity to ever see Red Highway. I suppose that it’s possible to find copies of it on eBay or something, but I would never be allowed to watch it, because my wife and I have a strict viewing policy in our house: she won’t allow anything scary (and this includes any footage of snakes) and I can’t watch any comedies that involve social awkwardness or humiliation. As a result, we end up watching a lot of gardening shows. (Hey! Don’t judge – it works for us.)
At any rate, this is all by way of explaining why I have been so looking forward to our baby delivery class for expectant parents. I have heard a rumor that classes like this show a movie of women having babies made by the producers of Red Highway. I’ve heard stories about strong men – cops and morticians and slaughterhouse workers – passing out or running from the room to be sick, and I definitely want to be a part of that.
I’ve wisely kept this to myself, so my wife thinks that I’m just being incredibly supportive as we carry our pillows into the conference room at the hospital where our class is being held.
“Do you think they have any air-sick bags in here?” I ask my wife.
“Oh! That’s so sweet!” she replies. “Don’t worry – I’ll be fine!”
[Oh – right. She might need one. I hadn’t thought of that.]
I just smile like the good husband I am and help her to our seats. The rest of the seats fill up pretty quickly with pregnant women with husbands in tow and I start to feel pretty good - happy for once to be in a roomful of people fatter than me. As a matter of fact, I start to daydream about making a movie myself – an action movie entirely made with pregnant women. I can imagine the gruff, pregnant WWII sergeant clearing out a room of heavily pregnant Nazi soldiers by lobbing an ice cream sandwich through the door like a hand grenade and letting them fight each other to the death for it.
I’m distracted from this reverie by our instructor, who has started the class. I have to give her credit; she’s good at this. She does her absolute best to make the men in the room feel involved, though this is difficult. We men are there to be supportive, but we all know that in the end, we will probably be fairly peripheral to the actual delivery. The women will do all the hard work and our job will be to say, “You’re doing great, Honey!” at regular intervals. The social fiction of this situation though, requires everyone in the room to pretend that we are here because of our intense interest in obstetrics. Our instructor makes the mistake of asking the men what they hope to learn from this class. The truth is, we all have one burning question – “How do you catch a baby if it squirts out too fast and slides onto the floor?” – but we all know better than to ask this out loud, so we all struggle to come up with an answer that is both caring and vague.
“What to you want to learn about?”
“Um…. Birth?”
“And you?”
“The um…birth process?”
“And you?”
“The um…er…experience of… um… birth?”
“And you – what do you hope to get out of this class?”
[Looking at the snack table] “Um, Cheetos?”
As the class continues, it becomes clear that we will not be seeing THE movie. True, we do watch A movie about a woman having her baby, but it is sadly tasteful. The only real moment of queasiness comes as I try to have a drink of water. My wife and I have brought water with us to class and to ensure that it stays cold, we put the water bottles in the freezer ahead of time. Unfortunately, this has left a plug of ice in the neck of my water bottle and taking a sip of water is a much more complicated process than I had anticipated. I have just figured out how to push the plug out of the way with my tongue when our instructor goes into a lurid description of my wife’s mucus plug and what will happen to it during delivery.
I’m reasonably sure our instructor has timed it that way on purpose.
My job, I learn, is to relax my wife as she delivers our baby. Apparently, we men are no longer referred to as “coaches”, which is just as well, because none of the coaches I’ve ever known was particularly good at relaxing. I’ve had this mental image of a florid-faced man in a golf shirt and a bad toupee with a whistle around his neck shouting at a pregnant woman in labor – “Relax, dammit, relax!! What’d’ya wanna do? – Kill this baby? RELAX!!!”.
I am given two main instructions, so simple that even I won’t be able to mess them up:
1) “Be unconditionally supportive.” This might put me in an awkward position if my wife demands that I bring her the head of one of her enemies. (I’m told that during labor, women lose all their inhibitions and that this is not beyond the realm of possibility.) I hope that “Wife In Labor” is a viable legal defense. I suspect it is.
2) “Keep her controlled and focused and not distracted from what she needs to do.” This means that Labor would probably be a bad time to tell her what I accidentally did to the dishwasher this morning.
