A month ago, my older brother Gabe effectively ruined me by getting married at the ripe age of… A month ago, my older brother Gabe effectively ruined me by getting married at the ripe age of 23. Already, moments after the ceremony, friends and relatives – like starving vultures – started coming up to me yelping, “Oh golly, Ben – looks like you’re up next, buddy!”

Those annoying jackasses. Just because Gabe’s taken the plunge doesn’t mean I’m next in line. Besides, getting married isn’t like having a bar mitzvah. You don’t turn a certain age and spontaneously become married, suddenly get whisked to the synagogue to be paraded around while getting pelted with rock-hard candies, everyone drunkenly chanting the Mazel Tov song, Grandma in the way back clapping her hands like a chimpanzee ready to get fed bananas. No, it’s nothing like that. I think it has something to do with women.

The scariest thing about Gabe getting married is my mom’s sudden, incessant, cackling baby-craziness. In the wedding guestbook, she signed: “Love, love, love. Babies, babies, babies.” Now that’s flat-out spooky. Her crouched stance – with a cup at her ear pushed against the wedded couple’s door, assiduously listening for the angelic sound of vaginal secretions – has become something of an Air Jordan-type of icon in our family.

Unfortunately, one fully functioning baby factory isn’t enough for my mother. Her thirst for grandkids can’t be sated by just one; she needs a pile of them – a veritable army of chunky, slobbering babies in bootsie outfits, spitting up Gerber carrot mash and pooping themselves. Yes, these thoughts melt my mother’s unholy heart.

To reach her unreasonable objective, she’s now upped the ante for me from, “When are you bringing a girlfriend home?” to “Make me baby now!” Any time I bring home anything resembling a female, my mother launches into an unremitting battery of questions for her, then anticipatorily reaches for her listening cup. At that point, I tend to get really aggravated, slap the cup away from her, and yell, “Damn it, Mom, I’m not about to put a baby in her.”

What my mother doesn’t consider, what the marriage only made all the more douchifyingly poignant, is that I have absolutely no game. I surmised I had this rare form of idiocy in the first grade when I tried to tell a girl I liked her by stabbing her in the ass with a No. 2 pencil. We both immediately started crying, but no baby was made that day. I haven’t had a relationship in two years, including the time I accidentally brushed against my cousin’s boob one hot Columbus Day back in 2001.

To date, the smoothest move I have in my repertoire is creepily staring at a girl at a party for a long time, getting drunk enough to come up to her, then bellowing, “If you’re such a dumb slut, how come you’re turning me on?” I wonder if that line lacks the inherent sensual subtleties of certain Rico Suaves, but who knows.

As I’ve learned, no girls equal no babies. Although I’d say I have the crucial ingredients to being a suitable baby-maker: My wang is operational, I have a pleasant lemony scent, I like sex with women – you know, I’m not sure there are any more criteria. But I’ve still got no girlfriend and no baby, which results in a really irritating mother.

Sometimes I wonder – like I imagine many people who aren’t ridiculously good-looking might wonder – if I was destined to be alone because there is no “perfect girl” for me. I wonder if I should accept this cruel fate and just use masturbation as a kind of okay door prize to substitute for not having a wife and family. It’s times like those when my mother tells me I am beautiful, and that is a heartening thing to hear. Then I stab her in the ass with a pencil.

Ben Rubin is a columnist for The Pitt News. E-mail him at [email protected].