Jack Sheehan learns that ‘junk in the trunk’ has taken on a completely different meaning

By Jack Sheehan

Sunday, Jan. 14, 2007 | 7:16 a.m.

It's no secret that kids everywhere in America grow up much faster today than they did 30 years ago. With MTV, the Internet, and explicit magazines blanketing the shelves and checkout stands of every grocery and convenience store, if a father waits until his kids have hit their teen years to give the birds-and-the-bees talk, chances are he's way too late.

My own father, great guy that he was, never did get up the nerve to sit me down and walk me through the sweaty truths about why men and women are equipped with different plumbing. We were Roman Catholic, and the very mention of anything related to sex in our household created a power outage and plunged our home into total blackness and silence. So I eventually learned it all from a back-alley kid 3 years older who provided visual evidence from a French magazine.

I remember my first thought when that punk broke the news to me: Maybe your parents do that stuff, but not mine!

Las Vegas offers its own special challenges to parents hoping to preserve their children's innocence as long as possible. With bare-butt billboards along the interstates, and 12-foot-wide signs that promise Hot Babes, Direct to Your Room rolling up and down the Strip, it's inevitable that even young kids in our city riding calmly in the back of the family car on a drive across town are eventually going to ask difficult questions of their parents.

A few years back my then-6-year-old son, J.P., asked me about the Crazy Girls "No Ifs, Ands or Butts" billboard along U.S. 95 near the Spaghetti Bowl. I told him it was a joke, that some people found it funny to aim their butts at a camera. Whenever we passed the sign for the next year, he would say something like, "Hey, Dad, there's that funny picture."

J.P. is now 10, and he doesn't laugh at that billboard anymore. I am certain he knows more about the real world out there than I did at age 14. So when he told me a couple of months back that one of his favorite groups was the Black-Eyed Peas, and that they were coming to the concert hall at Mandalay Bay, I thought that would make a nice holiday present for him. I worked the old Las Vegas juice angle to score four great seats, third row from the stage, dead center. (For the record, I paid full price for them.)

I liked the Peas' anthem, "Let's Get It Started," which is now played at least once a game in every NBA arena in the country, and several of their other hip-hop songs. I even told J.P. he could invite two of his buddies, and we'd enjoy a bang-up boys' night out.

A mother of one of our invited 10-year-olds asked me whether I was aware of the explicit nature of some of the Peas' hits, and I told her I wasn't. She suggested I check out the lyrics of the song "My Humps," which features their bombshell female lead Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson.

The opening stanza goes like this: "What you gon' do with all that junk? All that junk inside yo' trunk? I'ma get, get, get you drunk, Get you love drunk off my hump."

When I was a kid, junk in the trunk meant a crowbar, some oily old rags and a spare catcher's mitt in the back of our Buick. It doesn't mean that anymore.

Fortunately, even worldly young boys aren't quite savvy enough to grasp all these double-entendres and suggestive lyrics. I daresay there are probably several of them that flew right over my head as well.

I was also directed to Fergie's latest chart-topper, a ditty called "Fergalicious," which alludes to Ms. Fergy as a delicious buffet. I asked this boy's mother, who is an extremely responsible parent, whether she was OK with her son attending the concert with us, in light of the fact that when you listen to the sung lyrics of these songs they are delivered in such a rapid-fire, staccato style that you really can't understand them.

"Oh, it's OK," she said. "Our son has seen a whole lot worse on TV. I'm just disappointed there isn't an extra ticket for me."

We got to the concert just as the doors opened, and I was relieved to see I wasn't the only corrupting parent in the building. Seated near us was the former first grade teacher of both of my kids, along with her husband, their two daughters and friends, and there were several other preteens sprinkled throughout the concert hall. Seated two rows behind us was Josh Duhamel, a lead actor in the hit TV series "Las Vegas," who was shaking his groove thing. The kids thought that was pretty cool, that we had better seats even than the guy widely known as Fergie's main squeeze.

Although the Peas employed more pelvic thrusts than Elvis in his prime, causing me to jokingly place my hand over my kid's eyes a couple of times, all three of the boys declared at the end of the night that they had never had more fun in their lives. While by any measure the group's dance moves and lyrics would have to be considered R-rated, there was no talk from them of guns or violence or hate. Peace and love were the dominant themes in the performance and in the side banter shared with the audience. The very fact that this disparate group, composed of men and women, of black, white and yellow skin, could come together from different parts of the world and make great music sent an important message to these boys.

J.P. and his buddies even scored some guitar picks thrown from the stage at the end of the night, perfect souvenirs to recall years from now when they look back at the evening they came of age on the Las Vegas Strip.