The toothpaste is out of the tube, the horse has left the barn, the genie is out of the lamp, the bell can not be unrung.  The age of innocence is over. 

Two weekends ago my 13 year old son found himself in the middle of a sweaty mob of twenty somethings, engulfed in pot smoke and booze breath.  His lip was swollen from a flying elbow, his ears were ringing.

How did this happen?  How did my little Rafi (okay, Rafael now), whose biggest thrill in life just a few short years ago was sitting in the driver’s seat of the Bobcat loader parked in front of our house, end up in the mosh pit at a Mastodon concert?

Well, the obvious answer is that I took him.  I bought the tickets, drove him and a friend to the theater, told him to leave his phone on vibrate, made him promise he wouldn’t tell his mom that I left him and his friend unaccompanied in the pit, and then retired to the peace and quiet of the lobby, where my brother-in-law and I sat on the stairs for three hours, praying to god that Rafael and his friend wouldn’t be flattened between some 200 pound Mastodon fan and some 300 pound bouncer.

Hey, it’s not like I didn’t lecture him beforehand: “Now Rafael, just because I’m taking you to a hedonistic viper’s den where people seem to enjoy getting wasted listening to ear splitting noise, doesn’t mean I think it’s okay to get wasted and listen to ear splitting noise.”  I meekly offered him ear plugs and told him not to inhale while the older kids exhaled.  He declined to do either.

But how could I not take him to the show?  His birthday is at the end of June, and I knew he would never see this gift coming.  This is the one thing, besides cash and all you can eat sushi, that he actually would want.  Hell, I remember piling into my best friend’s dad’s Volvo station wagon at fourteen and being dropped off at the Roxy on the Sunset Strip to see the Untouchables. 

That experience is seared into my mind – in a good way –and I didn’t turn into a rock ‘n’ roll heroin junkie, either.  I use H only sparingly, and only when the social occasion calls for it. 

So yes, I got my chance to be the cool dad, too, all these years later. 

And of course it almost didn’t happen.

I co-own two bars, and through that world, I’m acquainted with the manager of the bar at the venue where Mastodon was playing.   While talking to him one night about the surprise birthday gift I was planning for my son, he offered to get me four tickets for free.  Perfect!   Ten years of selling one of the last legal drugs, of being ripped off by cokehead bartenders left and right, of dealing with brawling customers, had finally paid off in this well connected acquaintance.  I would take Rafi and a friend to see one of the hottest shows in town. 

My acquaintance assured me it was no big deal, that all I had to do was text him the day of the show, and the tix would be waiting for me at will call. 

So of course, on the day, I strode confidently up to the will-call window to find that no tickets were wating for me.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch.  In an embarrassed panic, I offered the clerk every permutation of my name possible, and then even threw in a few aliases – Zhiva Kirchanski, Scobie Nackley, Wataru Imai – what the hell, why not, but nothing turned up. 

I turned around, mortified, to see my son and his friend looking at me in a way that said, “Dude, don’t worry, we never thought you were that cool, anyway.”  Ugh, that was it!   I did not need their pity and I certainly did not want their contempt.  Just then, of course, a patron of mine from the bars, a real hipster with cool glasses and rock stair hair, gave me a quick hug and walked gingerly past me to successfully retrieve his tickets from will-call.

By this point my brother-in-law was at the corner, ready to head back to the car, and my son and his friend had their hands in their pockets, looking away from me, lest the stink of my failure corrupt their tender nostrils.

Desperation must’ve been writ large on my face, because within 10 seconds, a scalper was offering me tickets.  And for the first time in my life, I bought scalped tickets.  And at face value, too.  That’s right Ticketmaster – you can suck it!

And it couldn’t have been more worth it.

My kid loved the show, loved it.

He even answered his cell phone from the mosh pit every one of the 18 times I called to check in on him.  Hey, I wasn’t being a helicopter parent: some guy was actually hauled out of the mosh pit on a stretcher, and he outweighed my boy by a good 75 pounds.

It was a long, boring three hours sitting on the steps with my brother-in-law, but we stuck it out, laughing at the rococco variations of metalhead facial hair, and wondering if we were the only people in there without tattoos.

Rafael’s a low key kid.  At first glance, you might think him a sullen teen, and you wouldn’t be too far off, but you wouldn’t be spot-on, either.  It’s less that he’s sullen and more that he has an old, wary and cautious soul.  Even as an infant he was more prone to stare at you quizzically with slightly worried eyebrows than to smile and babble.  He has a wry, dark sense of humor, yet he prefers “Community” and “30 Rock” and “Parks and Rec” to “The Office” on Thursday TV night because he finds “The Office” a touch too mean spirited. 

When the house lights came up, he practically skipped out of the theater.  He was talking loud (okay, he was half deaf from the show), fast, and animated.  He wouldn’t stop bragging about his swollen lip and he laughed about some drunk guy who kept telling him he needed to be 21 to operate a cell phone.  He proclaimed the Mastodon concert the best show ever put on by any band anywhere.  Couldn’t get him or his friend to shut up the whole ride home.

And once home we shared a conspiratorial glance as he proudly told his mom how he survived the mosh pit.  Unaccompanied.  She disapproved of it all, of course, and was just glad she hadn’t been there to see it.  Rafael looked back at me with gratitude.  I know I’ll soon be losing a lot of him to his peers and his natural need to push away, but for a moment, my almost-sullen teen and I were a team, reveling in the night’s slightly naughty thrills.   For once we weren’t talking about his grades, how clean his room was, how much time he spent on video games, or how late he could stay up. 

Sometimes it’s okay to let the horse out of the barn, even if he gets a fat lip, a contact high, and is deaf for three days.