The 80's weren't so bad, either. Sometime around 1982 or '83, my best friend Patrick told me that he and his girlfriend were going to have sex for the first time and when I called bullshit he offered to put the phone under the bed so I could listen in. He and I were both 12, went to the same all-boys school and the likelihood that the girlfriend he'd been mentioning was even real seemed exceedingly slim.

Anyway, probably that same day and even same phone call and he tells me his girlfriend's at the door and the next thing I hear is that big beige plastic rotary phone of his getting tossed under the bed. I listened in for about 5 minutes, could only vaguely hear talking, got bored and hung up.

Now, if you remember back in the day, just because you hung up YOUR phone didn't always mean the phone disconnected unless the other person hung up theirs. A minute later, my mother comes in my room to see if my receiver is off the hook. She then exasperatedly explains that she's trying to call my grandmother but she can't get a dial tone and all she can hear is scraping and squeaking on the line.

After a lightning quick shrug of well-calculated feigned ignorance, my mother leaves. As soon as I can hear her downstairs, I gingerly pick up the receiver and sure enough, it's the bed squeaking. Mortified that my mother had been listening to my best friend lose his virginity, I gently put the handset back on the cradle and successfully pretended that the entire event hadn't happened, wasn't happening. Eventually the line disconnected and she was able to dial my gran.

Sure enough, it had all gone down like he said it would and, him being a Catholic, I had to listen to his guilt over having sex before marriage for weeks, afterward. The final conclusion he came to was it was only sex before marriage if the woman gets pregnant and has a baby and the baby grows up. Even at 12, I spotted a lot of holes in that line of reasoning but it seemed work for him, so I was happy.