Memo to Males of the Species: Forget About Sleep When Girl-Pals Gather

Men of a certain age, which is to say nearly all men, don’t know what they are wishing for when they wish for girls/women in the 19- to 22-year-old age group.

It’s the kind of weird fantasy that dies under the weight of reality. I know because that is an age group now visited upon our household. My two little girls have become big girls with big girlfriends and any sane man this side of Hugh Hefner should naturally avoid the intensity of lives still being created.

Then come throw-back moments like Saturday evening, when three dads dropped off their 19-year-old girls at our house. I was driving them to the Long Beach Catalina ferry and, by doing this, would be spared the task of picking them up a week or so hence.

Excuse me if I am a bit unclear, but when a kid goes off to college, I am no longer responsible for her exact arrival and departure times. I created that rule when the clutter of managing too many lives made me crazy.

Did I mention that I didn’t know about this driving deal until 10 minutes before it began to unfold? For all my youngest daughter knew I was getting up early Sunday morning to play golf.

Of course, I don’t play golf and if I did I’d never get up that early to do it.

No, Sunday is my day of worship.

Actually, Sunday is my day of sleep. Only I knew that I would not sleep at all because there would be three girls spending the night. Three girls who arrived with their far-too-happy dads and with cases of bottled water, duffles, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, haversacks, pillows and piles of art supplies. That’s because they were going to Catalina Island, to be volunteer YMCA camp counselors for a third straight summer. And it didn’t matter at all that they are now heading into their second year of college.

These are high school pals, survivors of an all-girl educational experience. They are, in short, sisters now deprived by life- circumstance of daily contact, which is what led my son to ask, “Think we’ll get any sleep?”

No. The answer to that was no because girls of this age are such … girls. Sure, they appear to be adult-like, able to manage and entertain between them three dozen kids at summer camp. They even brought enough beads, fabric samples, feathers and glue to produce 1,000 really awful crafts projects.

But under it all they are mostly children, female ones — loud, talkative, nearly hysterical. What’s more, they don’t require any sleep at all. This is because they are young and because they are college students, a group surpassed only by Navy SEALs when it comes to living sleep-deprived.

Why any grown man would want to be part of this crazed society is beyond me.

So is getting up at 5 a.m.

I hate 5 a.m. That’s why I have been avoiding it since I sold my Schwinn Newsboy bike with the large front basket. For two years, in good weather and bad, I arose at 5 a.m. to build strong legs and a decent throwing arm. That and a permanent hatred of rising at 5 a.m.

Yet there we were, three girls, one half-dead little boy and far too much stuff heading to Long Beach on sunken tires with the girls still yammering like a bad vaudeville act. And it was so easy to unload them and say bye-bye because they are now far too into their own lives to worry about its underpinnings.

That’s how the boy and I, the most immediate of those underpinnings, arrived at the Promenade Grill on the starboard side of the Queen Mary at 7 a.m. I didn’t actually know that this could be done. Nor have I ever seen the great ship so utterly deserted or so beautiful as she sat covered in an aura of sleep, its forever- thwarted movement a little less heartbreaking than usual.

The waiters let us sit and drink hot chocolate until the buffet was set up. Through thick panes of glass sandwiched between riveted steel we looked out at the sun slanting perfectly across the harbor, across a marina load of silent boats and across the ferry that passed directly beneath us carrying our girls to somewhere else.I want to hear your

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* Daily Breeze/John Bogert, 5215 Torrance Blvd., Torrance, CA 90503-4077